it? it is only an idle wild.' I did not tell him, but I bought it and you see what I have done with it, and that I was indebted to my Dutch prede- cessor for a very pretty and appropriate name." Irving, Halleck, and numerous other friends of Wil- lis visited him at Idlewild, and on one occasion, when Digitized by Microsoft® 262 The Hudson River he had been there with Mr. and Mrs. Moses H. Grin- nell, his neighbours at Sunnyside, Washington Irving expressed the opinion that the poet's cough was hkely to prolong his hfe by making him more careful of his health. " I do not think his lungs are affected," was the cheerful diagnosis. The reference made by General Wilson to the dis- tant view from Idlewild of Gulian C. Verplanck's home suggests the strong contrast between these Highland neighbours. Bryant says of Verplanck: As a young man he took no part in the Cockloft and other froUcs of his friends Irving, Paulding, and Kemble; but on the contrary, he was held up by the elder men of the period as an example of steady, studious, and spotless youth. Mr. Verplanck was born in Wall Street, New York, in 1786. His grandmother was a daughter of Daniel Crommelin of Amsterdam, and by her the boy, mother- less frora infancy, was reared. He graduated at Col- umbia College when only fifteen years of age, and studied law with Edward Livingston, being finally adrnitted to the bar at the age of twenty-one years, by Chief -Justice (afterwards Chancellor) Kent. Mr. Verplanck was one of those earnest men, of many activities and tireless energy, who undertake seemingly incongruous tasks without hesitation and perform them with credit. Such as he are not plentiful in any gener- ation. His first public appearance, we are told, was as a Fourth of July orator. A year or two later we find Digitized by Microsoft® 263 Digitized by Microsoft® Digitized by Microsoft® Literary Associations of the Hudson 265 him in trouble with Mayor De Witt CHnton, then writ- ing pohtical articles, satires aimed at the Mayor and his friends, and afterwards contributing to Irving 's magazine, The Analectic. He was elected to the As- sembly by the "Bucktail" party, and while still a member of that body wrote a book on the Uses of the Evidences of Revealed Religion, and was chosen to fill a professorship in the General Theological Seminary. Several years later. New York elected him to Congress, and his voice was heard on public questions with no uncertain sound. After his retirement from political life, he gave himself devotedly to literary pursuits, and was for half a century one of the best known writers of the city. Space would fail should we attempt to tell of his occupations or recount his honours. He was Regent of the University of the State of New York; member, and afterwards Warden, of the Vestry of Trinity Church; President of the Century Club; President of the Board of Emigration; and chairman of various charitable bodies. To the task of editing the edition of Shakespeare that bears his name, he added that of making a strenuous and successful fight for the exten- sion of the copyright law from twenty-eight to forty- eight years. An entertaining anecdote of Verplanck's reception of Irving 's Knickerbocker well illustrates the temper of his mind. In 1818, during an address before the New York Historical Society, he took occasion to deprecate Digitized by Microsoft® 266 The Hudson River the injustice done to the Dutch character by Knicker- bocker : It is painful [he said] to see a mind as admirable for its exquis- ite perception of the beautiful as it is for its quick sense of the ridiculous wasting the riches of its fancy on an ungrateful theme, and its exuberant humour in a coarse caricature. Commenting on this, Irving wrote to his brother, Ebenezer : I have seen what Verplanck says of my work. ... He is one of the honestest men I know of in speaking his opinion. I am sure he wishes me well' . . . but were I his bitterest enemy, such an opinion have I of his integrity of mind, that I would refer any one to him for an honest account of me, sooner than to almost any one else. Mr. Verplanck 's ancestral home was at Fishkill-on- the- Hudson. There his last years were spent under the roof that his grandfather erected; and there he died, a sober-minded man of many gifts. His friends included nearly all of the literary men of his day, and no citizen was more honoured. George P. Morris, the " Dear Morris" of so many of Willis's " hurrygraphs ' ' and letters from various places, belongs