At the time General Harrison was called from the clerkship of the County Court of Hamilton County, Ohio, to preside at the People’s High Assizes at Washington, he lived at North Bend, a very different crook from that of his predecessor. He was sixty-eight years of age, and in feeble health; yet so seldom do people die in desirable offices, that any life-insurance company would have taken his life in a policy at the lowest premium. April 4, 1841, however, he died. Of course John Tyler, the Vice-President, did not. To the subsequent regret of his party he lived on—a plane of his own, quite apart from the platform upon which he was placed by them, and bisected by a Virginia ecliptic so oblique that it rarely touched anything or anybody. Mr. Clay and the Whigs tried hard and long to shape a bank bill to his amphibious tastes; but as they could not find a body, neck, or feet to suit the bill, they abandoned the study of natural history as illustrated by Mr. Tyler. A bank—some bank—he seemed desirous to have; because he entertained a profound conviction that a bank was a good place to put a counter in. Like the gentleman who possessed a first-rate flint, and wished a gunsmith just to fit a good breech, lock, stock, and barrel to it, the acting President seemed anxious, in his interviews with the Congressional banksmiths, to have them fit a good bank, vaults, specie, and circulation, to his admirable counter. As Cuvier objected to the definition of a crab given by the French Academy, namely, “that it was a small red fish which walks backwards,” as “wanting three things to make it correct: first, that the crab was not a fish; second, that it was not red; and third, that it did not walk backwards”: so the leaders of the party which elected him found equal fault with Mr. Tyler as defining in his own person the name of Whig on three grounds: first, that he was not a Whig in principle; second, nor in theory; third, nor in practice. The original Cabinet members all resigned, except Mr. Webster, Secretary of State, who remained to complete in July, 1842, with Lord Ashburton, a treaty to disentangle our northeastern boundary lines and fish lines from the hard knots into which they were running. A Bankrupt Act was thrown out by Congress in 1841, as planks for traders shipwrecked by the tidal waves which followed the earthquake of 1837; but the principal benefit of the act resulted in throwing the stranded fortunes to the official wreckers, called assignees in bankruptcy, who secured most of the stuff cast upon the shore. In two years this barbarous wrecking business was stopped by the repeal of the law.