least a _style_ of its own,
which found a few imitators. It ranks, I think, about _pari passu_ with
Coryatt's "Crudities," or lower.

There were two or three salons in New York where there were weekly
literary receptions, and where one could meet the principal writers of
the time. I often saw at Kimball's and other places the Misses
Wetherell, who wrote the "Wide, Wide World" and "Queechy." They were
elderly, and had so very little of the "world" in their ways, that they
occurred to me as an example of the fact that people generally write most
on what they know least about. Thus a Lowell factory-girl likes to write
a tale of ducal society in England; and when a Scotchman has less
intelligence of "jocks" and "wut" than any of his countrymen, he
compiles, and comments on, American humorists.

Once there was a grand publishers' dinner to authors where I went with
Alice and Phoebe Carey, who were great friends of mine. There I met and
talked with Washington Irving; I remember Bryant and N. P. Willis, _et
tous les autres_. Just at that time wine, &c., could only be sold in New
York "in the original packages as imported." Alice or Phoebe Carey
lamented that we were to have none at the banquet. There was a large
dish of grapes before her, and I said, "Why, there you have plenty of it
in the original packages!"

At that time very hospitable or genial hosts used to place a bottle of
brandy and glass in the gentlemen's dressing-room at an evening's
reception, and I remember it was considered a scandalous thing when a
certain old retired naval officer once emptied the whole bottle single-
handed.

Of course I was very intimate with Clark of the _Knickerbocker_, Fred
Cozzens, John Godfrey Saxe, and all the company of gay and festive
humorists who circled about that merry magazine. There was never
anything quite like the _Knickerbocker_, and there never will be again.
It required a sunny, genial social atmosphere, such as we had before the
war, and never after; an easy writing of gay and cultivated men for one
another, and not painfully elaborating jocosities or seriosities for the
million as in--But never mind. It sparkled through its summer-time, and
oh! how its readers loved it! I sometimes think that I would like to
hunt up the old title-plate with Diedrich Knickerbocker and his pipe, and
issue it again every month to a few dozen subscribers who loved quaint
odds and ends, till I too should pass away!

It was ea