When the subject of this sketch was two years old his father died, and the family soon after removed to Philadelphia, and thence to Pottsville, in the same State. Mr. Neal resided here until 1831, when he settled in Philadelphia, and assumed the duties of editor of the Pennsylvanian, a journal which became very popular, and conspicuous for its influence on the political character of the State. It was in the office of this journal that the elder James Gordon Bennett passed a portion of his early years in journalism. For nearly ten years Mr. Neal devoted his talents to the Pennsylvanian, but at length his health failed him, and in 1841 he went abroad, traveling in Europe and Africa for nearly two years. In 1844 he retired from the editorial chair of the Pennsylvanian, and established in the autumn of the same year a weekly literary miscellany, under the title of Neal’s Saturday Gazette. Neal’s reputation as a writer secured for the Gazette an immediate and continued success. Joseph C. Neal’s humorous sketches of that character for which he afterwards became distinguished, first appeared in the Pennsylvanian under the title of “City Worthies.” These sketches were reprinted and praised in hundreds of American newspapers. In 1837 he published Charcoal Sketches, or Scenes in a Metropolis. In these sketches he drew from life a class of characters peculiar to the lower classes and disreputable haunts in large cities. The appearance of the sketches in book form was hailed with delight, and several large editions were readily disposed of. The work was also republished in London under the auspices of Charles Dickens, who took a great interest in the American humorist and his works. In 1844 Mr. Neal issued his second book, Peter Ploddy and Other Oddities, and soon after, another and newer series of Charcoal Sketches. Both of these books commanded a large and ready sale. Neal continued to edit the Saturday Gazette until July 3, 1848, when he died very suddenly at his home in Philadelphia, of a complication of diseases. His widow published a second and revised edition of his works some years after his death. Soon after his death, R. W. Griswold, in his Prose Writers of America, said of Mr. Neal: “He writes as if he had little or no sympathy with his creations, and as if he were a calm spectator of acts and actors, whimsical or comical,--an observer rather by accident than from desire.... His style is compact and pointed, abounding in droll combinations and peculiar phrases, which have the ease and naturalness of transcripts of real conversations. He had too much good nature to be caustic, and too much refinement to be coarse. In some of his sketches he exhibits not only a happy faculty for the burlesque, and singular skill in depicting character, but a generality and heartiness of appreciation which carry the reader’s feelings along with his fancy.” The following selection from Peter Ploddy will tend to show Mr. Neal’s peculiar style of writing: