JAMES R. WHITING is a man whose head commands our profoundest respect, and his heart our warmest attachment. This is no age for him. He is like a cat in a strange garret among the Busteeds, and Connollys, and Pursers, and Devlins, and Smiths, and Erbens, and other perjured aliens and plunderers that prowl around the City Treasury. But James R. Whiting would have been adored in the halcyon or tumultuous days of the Persian, Egyptian, Grecian, or Roman Empires. But neither the press nor the people will ever appreciate his wisdom, patriotism, and sacrifice in these degenerate times. God bless James R. Whiting! and when he dies, the honest people will weep over his departure, as the Athenians did over the bones of Socrates, whom they kicked, and cuffed, and taunted with insanity, and accused of corrupting the youth of his country, and thrust poison down his throat, but they deeply regretted their folly and cruelty, and the Grecians of every age have mourned his melancholy fate, and cursed their ancestors for their neglect and persecution of the scholar and patriot, and unrivalled Father of Philosophers, since the globe was launched into the atmospheric waves. Peter Cooper’s Avarice and Infernal Antecedents. We all know how John Jacob Astor and Stephen Girard got their first thousand dollars. And now let us see how Peter Cooper obtained his first fifteen hundred dollars. When quite young and penniless, the American Government owed Peter Cooper’s aunt fifteen hundred dollars, as pension money, which Peter long besought his aunt to let him strive to obtain, and she invested him with the power to collect it, and he soon obtained it without much difficulty through some of the vagabond politicians of those days, for whom he had done some dirty work in securing their election to Congress and other civil trusts. On obtaining the money, Peter requested the parties who got it for him never to disclose it, and they promised they would not. After he got it, Peter would often visit his sick and needy and aged aunt, and assure her that he had not obtained it, nor would he ever be able to force the Government to pay her. One evening a friend called on Peter’s aunt, (who had been absent in a foreign land,) and found her very ill, and in the last stages of poverty, having sold or pawned nearly all she had. On perceiving this sad state of her affairs, he exclaimed: “Why, my good lady, how could you so rapidly squander the fifteen hundred dollars, with interest, that Peter Cooper obtained for you from our Government, as the pension due you for the patriotic services of your illustrious kindred?” She slowly raised her skeleton form from the bed, and reclining on her hands and side, she said in a husky and feeble tone: “My dear nephew, Peter Cooper, has often told me that my claim is invalid, and that I can never obtain a cent.” Her friend then started from his chair, and shook her hand, and kissed