drich wrote
his "Ballad of Babie Bell"; and there, at No. 84 which was the residence
of Judge Daly, the African explorer Paul Du Chaillu wrote fiction and
fact that by sceptical contemporaries was generally accepted as fiction.
A block farther north was another home of Mrs. Botta, and the house of
the actress who is remembered as Tom Moore's first sweetheart, and the
one-time abode of William Cullen Bryant, who wrote of it as being near
the home of Irving's friend Brevoort. The neighbourhood is rich with
memories. We have but to beckon and the ghosts of those literary men and
women whose names have been forgotten, and of those whose reputations
have endured, step forth in imagination to fill the street. I see
Irving, down from his Sunny side estate for a visit to the town that was
once the fat village of his Diedrich Knickerbocker, strolling over from
the Irving Place structure that is reputed to have been his, but which
was not his, to study the new manners and fashions, and to mull on the
startling changes and swift passage of time. I see the irascible author
of the "Leather Stocking Tales," for the moment weary of squabbling
over land agreements with his Cooperstown neighbours and prosecuting
suits against up-state newspapers, stealing into New York for a glimpse
of his first city residence down in Beach Street in Greenwich Village,
where he wrote "The Pilot," and "Lionel Lincoln," and incidentally
satisfying his curiosity as to the new developments in urban elegance
and fashion. I can see FitzGreene Halleck and Joseph Rodman Drake, a
mile or two away from their accustomed haunts; and any one else whom it
pleases me to see; our foreign guests and critics, Dickens, looking
about superciliously, or Anthony Trollope, breathing hard, or Trollope
_mere_, or Harriet Martineau, or Captain Marryat, or Mayne Reid, or
Samuel Lover. For in a case like this a trifling matter like an
anachronism or a misstatement counts for little or nothing.

On Ninth Street, just west of the Charles De Rhams house, which was
formerly the Henry Brevoort house, are the two or three buildings that
in bygone days made up the Hotel Griffou. There, twenty years or so ago,
the late Thomas A. Janvier lived and studied the queer Latin-American
types that went into his stories of the Efferanti family. There also
William Dean Howells frequently dined, and the late Edmund Clarence
Stedman and Richard Watson Gilder went from time to time. Then the older
and