WINFIELD SCOTT came into life in 1786, and so crystallized about himself each of the three wars in which he was the principal magnet,—the maritime contest of 1812, the Mexican war in 1847, and the opening of the Rebellion in 1861,—that his calm front and majestic presence would readily single him out as the model figure for our American Mars. Like a great elm in the Berkshire valley he stands, massive in strength of trunk, spreading out in varied branches of learning, special study, and active experience, and dropping his pendulous, wide-circuiting limbs and generous foliage over a broad expanse of rich meadow. Under this vast, wide-reaching, many-dropping banyan-tree history seems to gather in a sleepy, contented calm. Dearly do we all love to pause over the beautifully bordered page which holds the genial, sunny-faced visage of WASHINGTON IRVING. He was four years old when Washington delivered his first Inaugural. Through all the nineteenth century he shines, like a blessed presence, until his eclipse, in 1859. How our landscapes, the lives of our best and worthiest, the graceful legends of our rivers, mountains, prairies, and historical sites,—barren, voiceless, and dumb before, warm into life, and stretch out their living hands in tender entreaty, instinct and round with charms of persuasive beauty, as, like the prophet over the child, he stretches himself over them! Of some of his associates and compeers, still happily spared to us, we cannot speak; for the living are too numerous to be enumerated, and too near to be sketched; but of JOSEPH RODMAN DRAKE, whose brief twenty-five years of life exhaled such beautiful and deathless creations as the Culprit Fay; of FITZ-GREENE HALLECK, his companion and fellow-laborer, whose rare humor stole into delicious song, as sprites are said to play hide-and-seek in buttercups and honeysuckles; and of JAMES R. PAULDING, linked in literary work as by family ties with Irving, and whose diversified genius gives him a large, if not a choice place in our Walhalla,—of all these kindly faces we delight to keep copies in our album.