When he came to New York to live, in 1842, and during his continued residence there for more than ten years from that date, Manhattan was by no means the metropolis that it is to-day, though it had begun to assume already that cosmopolitan and intensely commercial character which distinguishes it from all other American cities. It had a considerable and swiftly growing foreign population, and its society was marked by a liveliness and extravagance which contrasted with the plainer and more earnest tone prevailing in Boston, and with the somewhat provincial cast of Philadelphia life. The Battery was still the fashionable promenade, Canal Street was “up town,” Hoboken, a rural suburb, Pine, Ann, and William Streets, and the Bowling Green were genteel residence quarters. The old Park Theatre was--after the burning of the National--the only respectable playhouse, until Niblo’s was opened in what was then the outskirt of the town. New York prided itself, moreover, on being a literary centre. The term “Knickerbocker School,” which has been invented to describe a group of metropolitan writers who owed their inspiration, in some sort, to Washington Irving, is of uncertain application; and there was no such cohesion among the members of the group as to warrant the name of a school. But if the term be extended to cover all the authors whose birth or long residence identified them with New York city, it may include Bryant and Halleck, who were the most prominent literary figures when Willis went there to live, though both of them, like him, were of New England birth and breeding. Bryant had been since 1826 editor of the “Evening Post” and Halleck, who had almost ceased to write and was devoting himself exclusively to his duties as secretary to Mr. John Jacob Astor, left the city in 1849, and retired to his old home in Guilford, Connecticut. With both of these Willis was more or less intimate, meeting them frequently at dinners and in general society. Irving himself, the starting-point of the Knickerbocker writers, was out of the country when Willis settled in New York, having gone as minister to Spain in 1842. He came back in 1846 and took up his residence at Sunnyside. Cooper was living at Cooperstown, where Willis made him a flying visit and renewed the acquaintance so pleasantly begun at Paris in 1832. This was in the summer of 1848, which Willis spent at Sharon Springs, recovering from an attack of rheumatism. Theodore Fay too was abroad, filling diplomatic posts in Germany and Switzerland. Years after, on his return to America, he visited Willis at Idlewild, and the latter found him greatly aged and saddened since the days when he wrote mild town satires and humorous sketches for the “New York Mirror.” Eastburn, Sands, and Drake were all dead, and Paulding had signalized the close of his literary career by publishing a collection of his works in numerous volumes. He too had been a contributor to the old “Mirror,” and so had another of the