when
he began, _and maintaining himself_ by writing, either as editor of _The
Telegraph_, coeditor of _The Portico_, (for which he wrote near a volume
octavo in a year or two,) and also as joint-editor of Paul Allen's
_Revolution_, besides a tremendous avalanche of novels and poetry. We
have amused ourself casting up the amount of this four years' labor. It
seems entirely too large for the calibre of common belief, and we
suppose Neal will hardly believe us, especially if he have grown
luxurious and lazy in these latter days. Crowded into these four years,
we find: for the _Portico_ and _Telegraph_, and half-a-dozen other
papers, ten volumes; 'Keep Cool,' two volumes; 'Seventy-Six,' two
volumes; 'Errata,' two volumes; 'Niagara and Goldau,' two volumes; Index
to Niles' Register, three volumes; 'Otho,' one volume; 'Logan,' four
volumes; 'Randolph,' two volumes; Buckingham's Galaxy, Miscellanies, and
Poetry, two volumes; making the incredible quantity of thirty volumes.
He could no more have gone leisurely and carefully through this amount
of work, than a skater could walk a mile a minute on his skates. The
marvel is, that he got through it on any terms, not that he won his own
disrespect forever. We do not wonder that he manufactured more bayonets
than bee-stings for his literary armory, but we wonder that he became a
literary champion at all. With all the irons Neal had in the fire, we
are not to expect Addisonian paragraphs; and yet he has in his lifetime
been mistaken for Washington Irving, as we can show by an extract from
an old letter of his, which we will give by and by.

A power that could produce what Neal produced between 1819 and 1823,
properly disciplined and economized, might have performed tasks
analogous to those of the lightning, since it has been put in harness
and employed to carry the mail. When genius has its day of humiliation
for the wasted water of life, Neal may put on sackcloth, for he never
economized his power; but for the soul's fire quenched in idleness, or
smothered in worldliness, certainly for these years, he need wear no
weeds.

His novels are always like a rushing torrent, never like a calm stream.
They all are dignified with a purpose, with a determination to correct
some error, to remedy some abuse, to do good in any number of instances.
They are not unlike a field of teasels in blossom--there are the thorny
points of this strange plant, and the delicate and exceedingly beautiful
blos