Types of American character in many respects are the originals of the two thin-faced portraits to which we next turn,—types in their foreign birth, their obscure social belongings, and their shrewd and successful business ventures,—STEPHEN GIRARD, coming into life in 1750, at Bordeaux, France, as acid as the claret of his native city, and commanding, like it, very profitable prices by transportation to this country, a sailor’s son, and until his nineteenth year himself a sailor; and JOHN JACOB ASTOR, his junior by thirteen years, offspring of a poverty-worried peasant, ushered first into a cabin at Waldorf, near Heidelberg, where black bread and small hopped beer were all that incessant labor could procure. The former lived eighty-one, the latter eighty-five years upon our planet; and by faithfully gathering up from its surface, water and land, from its ships, stores, and offices, and from its furred and unfurred animals, the gains which persistent early rising, industry, and ceaseless penny-turning accumulate, left fortunes, the first of nine, the last of twenty millions of dollars. “Sic itur ad Astra.” The Astral-lamp Library, obtained by funds bequeathed by a benefaction, like Girard’s College, appreciative of what its donor had himself missed, sheds its genial light on many a poor scholar’s desk. If each legacy has been somewhat diverted from its testamentary direction, perhaps the best excuse may be found in the reason why married women were not allowed to have their wills after death, because they had them so much while living. JOHN MARSHALL, to whose unmistakably pure-minded face we turn in safe admiration, was one of those types of leadership, one of those representatives of schools, who, violently liked or disliked when living, has by the touch of death been canonized among the white-robed of the nation. An incarnation, when alive, of Federalism, his ermine has become so white under the fulling of time and by contrast with robes since worn, and his grasp of the judicial balances was, as is now seen, so firm, so unimpassioned and unshaken by a nervous partisanship, that he has already passed into the very small list of judges, whose lofty character, stainless purity, large judicial capacities and force, are like solid cool rocks amid the ever-shifting scenes and temperatures of a varied landscape.