Believing that the most efficacious method of exciting the talent of the living, is to confer due honors on departed merit, we have, nearly fifty years after his death, and thirty years after the destruction of his papers and almost everything throwing light upon his life undertaken this compilation. It must necessarily be very imperfect and incomplete, but inadequate as it is, it seems well to preserve it, as showing a wish, at least, to give to heaven-born talent its due. We should like to have had sufficient material for fully portraying this remarkable man, his actions, his feelings, his thoughts and his adventures. Such a work would have derived additional interest from the fact that it would have recalled and preserved the recollection of his companions and friends, the kindred spirits of his day, now dead and nearly forgotten. As this could not be done, we have garnered up, in a fragmentary way, and not always in chronological sequence, the material, some of it light and trivial, [for it is said, P's 1st, "of the Godly man" "his leaf also shall not wither,"] presented in the following pages, and while it is only a half lifting of the veil of oblivion, it gives us a glimpse, at least, into an almost forgotten life, and serves too, to keep in memory his interesting family of Montgomery Hall. Like all families, it has been dispersed, but it richly deserves to be held in memory and handed down to posterity. In one of his eloquent sermons, Dr. Talmage thus speaks of oblivion, which he styles the cemetery of the human race. "Why, just look at the families of the earth how they disappear. For awhile they are together, inseparable and to each other indispensable and then they part, some by marriage going to establish other homes, and some leave this life, and a century is long enough to plant a family, develop it, prosper it, and obliterate it. So the generations vanish." Mr. Peyton's family, forming no exception to the rule, has been dispersed, but it survives in its branches and without signs of decay. Indeed, some of the young shoots exhibit the life and vigor, the virtue and valor of the original stock, which has stood for centuries, in the language of Lord Bacon, "against the winds and weathers of time." May these vigorous branches spread out, increase, keep pace with the grand march of humanity, and the oblivion of the family be as distant in the future as was its origin in the past.