and a careless
compilation, _The Works of John Cleveland ..._ (1687), containing
poems taken from all these sources. A prefatory note by Williamson
makes it clear that only a small proportion of Cleveland's political
poems have survived, many of them having been dispersed in MS. among
his friends and so lost, and that he refused to authenticate an
edition of his works, although most of the earlier collections were
genuine.

CLEVELAND, STEPHEN GROVER (1837-1908), president of the United States
from 1885 to 1889, and again from 1893 to 1897, was born, the fifth in a
family of nine children, in the village of Caldwell, Essex county, New
Jersey, on the 18th of March 1837. His father, Richard F. Cleveland, a
clergyman of the Presbyterian Church, was of good colonial stock, a
descendant of Moses Cleveland, who emigrated from Ipswich, England, to
Massachusetts in 1635. The family removed to Fayetteville, N.Y., and
afterwards to Clinton, N.Y. It was intended that young Grover should be
educated at Hamilton College, but this was prevented by his father's
death in 1852. A few years later he drifted westward with twenty-five
dollars in his pocket, and the autumn of 1855 found him in a law office
in the city of Buffalo. At the end of four years (1859), he was admitted
to the bar.

In 1863 he was appointed assistant district attorney of Erie county, of
which Buffalo is the chief city. This was his first public office, and
it came to him, like all later preferments, without any solicitation of
his own. Two years later (1865) he was the Democratic candidate for
district attorney, but was defeated. In 1869 Cleveland was nominated by
the Democratic party for the office of sheriff, and, despite the fact
that Erie county was normally Republican by a decisive majority, was
elected. The years immediately succeeding his retirement from the office
of sheriff in 1873 he devoted exclusively to the practice of law, coming
to be generally recognized as one of the leaders of the western New York
bar. In the autumn of 1881 he was nominated by the Democrats for mayor
of Buffalo. The city government had been characterized by extravagance
and maladministration, and a revolt of the independent voters at the
polls overcame the usual Republican majority and Cleveland was elected.
As mayor he attracted wide attention by his independence and
business-like methods, and under his direction the various departments
of the city government