I must inform the honest reader, that great value was set by the Common Council upon the fact, that the major had transferred his affections from the whig to the democratic party, which could not fail to shed a lasting luster upon its principles.  Two honest Hibernian members of the very common board of very uncommon councilmen, had, with that modesty so characteristic of them, paid me the high compliment of saying, that I had been justly styled the great northern political war horse.  I could not suppress a blush at seeing myself cut so strange a figure, inasmuch as the flourish of speech was such as had never been thought of by Aristotle, and would have paled even Henry Clay.  Let no man, therefore, doubt the truth of what I here say; for I am not given to writing satires, preferring to wait until heaven shall send me some nobler mission.  Nor would I have the reader express surprise, that persons so humble as the major and myself should be thus suddenly subjected to the process of hero making so much in fashion with the forty thousand idlers and politicians of New York, who have graciously taken upon themselves the directing of all public affairs, seeing that good men are so engaged in the getting of gold as to care not a whit if the devil get all their liberties.  And if the reader have read the histories of Greece and Rome, wherein it is written that he only was made a hero who had achieved some great undertaking, and thereby conferred lasting honors upon his country, his surprise may be increased at the strange elements of character necessary to a hero at this day.  But I humbly beg him to consider the circumstances of these forty thousand idlers and other politicians, who, having no employment for their fingers, let the devil direct their brains, and have turned hero making into a commerce of so cheap a quality, that no good christian can be got to engage in it.  In fine, (and it is no vulgar invention of my brain,) the virtues required of an hero at this day, are that he have been a great marauder, who, having invaded the country of a poor, down trodden people, driven them from their quiet homes, plundered them of their property, ravished their daughters, drenched their fields with the blood of the innocent, and whitened the highways with the bones of his own dissolute but deluded followers, and spread desolation over the land, had to leave it a vanquished miscreant.  And upon the principle, that if you give power to the idle and reckless they will make heroes to suit their kind and circumstances, he will then be received at the Battery with a great waste of powder, and such other noisy demonstrations as shall please the unruly.  From thence he shall be conveyed in a shabby carriage, drawn by four lean horses, escorted by six firemen in red shirts, and preceded by two Dutch drummers with serious faces, and long, light beards, and a dyspeptic negro fifer, through sundry of our most crowded streets.  And there shall follow him a procession of urchins, so