Mr. Colton is a man of very decided abilities, voluminous and various in their manifestation, and assiduously cultivated during a long life, in which he has never failed of the curiosity, ambition, and industry of a learner. The untiring freshness and hopefulness of his spirit is shown by his undertaking the study of the French language not more than three or four years ago, and obtaining such a mastery of it as to read with delight its most abstruse authors, and to preach in it with fluency and even with eloquence. It is characteristic of him that he is always earnest, and that he considers whatever he has to do worthy of his best abilities, so that in writing of theology, economy, polity, or manners, he arrays in order for each particular subject all the forces of his understanding, and makes its discussion their measure and illustration. He has been in an eminent degree devoted to literature as a profession, and although he has produced works which may be deemed unfortunate in design or defective in execution, it must be admitted that he is entitled to a highly respectable position as a thinker and as a writer, and that in opinion and in affairs he has exercised a steady and large influence. He was born in Long Meadow, Massachusetts, graduated at Yale College in 1812, studied divinity at Andover, and in 1815 took orders in the Presbyterian church. For several years he was settled in the village of Batavia in western New-York, but his voice failing in 1826, he became a contributor to several of the principal periodicals occupied with religion and learning, and in the summer of 1831, after an extended tour through the western states and territories, proceeded to London, as a correspondent of the New-York Observer. In England, he led a life of remarkable literary activity. In 1832 he published a _Manual for Emigrants to America_, which had a large sale among the middling classes; and _The History and Character of American Revivals of Religion_, of which there were two or three editions. In 1833, in a volume entitled _The Americans, by an American in London_, he replied, with an unanswerable display of facts, to the libels on this country by British travellers and reviewers; and published _The American Cottager_, a religious narrative. _A Tour of the American Lakes and among the Indians of the North-West Territory_, in two volumes, and _Church and State in America_, a vindication of the religious character of the country and the voluntary principle for the support of religion, in reply to the Bishop of London, who had endeavored to show that the United States were going back to paganism because the church was not here connected with the state.