Here have lived, for longer or shorter periods, sundry Presidents of the United States, from Washington to Cleveland; the city has been the permanent or occasional home of statesmen such as Jay and Livingston, Alexander Hamilton and Gouverneur Morris; of political agitators such as Aaron Burr and “Commonsense” Paine, and political leaders like DeWitt Clinton and Samuel J. Tilden; of authors such as Washington Irving, whose burlesque local history marked him out as the father of American light literature, Fenimore Cooper, the most popular of American romance-writers, and Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman, most individual of American poets. Here, for longer or shorter periods, have lived and labored Curtis, and Bayard Taylor, and Stoddard, and Stedman, and Aldrich, and Howells, and that greatest of poets among journalists and journalists among poets, William Cullen Bryant, editor of _The Evening Post_ and one of the founders of the Century Club; and Horace Greeley, founder of _The Tribune_, and most famous of American editors since Benjamin Franklin. As a resident of Brooklyn, and editor of a metropolitan religious weekly, the best-known preacher of the century, Henry Ward Beecher, was virtually a citizen of New York. In the annals of invention, the names of four New Yorkers stand out conspicuously—Fulton and Ericsson and Edison and Morse. And of all the free-booters that ever terrorized the sea, none has left a more awful and enduring fame than a once respectable resident of Liberty Street, renowned in song and story for two centuries as Captain Kidd. The hospitality of New York and her people is proverbial. Every distinguished visitor to America for more than a century past has been entertained here, officially or informally. Among the city’s guests have been William IV. of England, while yet a sailor prince; Lafayette, Louis Kossuth, the Prince of Wales, the Grand Duke Alexis, the Emperor of Brazil, the Princess Eulalia, the Duke of Veragua, Li Hung Chang and the Marquis Ito. Almost all the greatest preachers, orators, players, singers, and instrumental performers of the nineteenth century have added to their fame or wealth by facing New York audiences; and among the great writers who have visited us have been Dickens, Thackeray, and Kipling.