The editor whose sanity was questioned was the famous Mordecai Manuel Noah, one of the most versatile men of his time. He was a newspaper correspondent at fifteen. When he was twenty-eight, President Madison appointed him to be consul-general at Tunis, where he distinguished himself by his rescue of several Americans who were held as slaves in the Barbary States. On his return to New York, in 1816, he again entered journalism, and was successively connected with the _National Advocate_, the _Enquirer_, the _Commercial Advertiser_, the _Times and Messenger_, and the _Evening Star_. In 1825 he attempted to establish a great Jewish colony on Grand Island, in the Niagara River, but he found neither sympathy nor aid among his coreligionists, and the scheme was a failure. Noah wrote a dozen dramas, all of which have been forgotten, although he was the most popular playwright in America at that day. His _Evening Star_ was a good paper, and the _Sun’s_ quarrels with it were not serious. For their attacks on Attree, the editor of the _Transcript_, Messrs. Day and Wisner got themselves indicted for criminal libel. They took it calmly: Bigger men than we have passed through that ordeal. There is Major Noah, the Grand Mogul of the editorial tribe, who has not only been indicted, but, we believe, placed at the bar. Then there’s Colonel Webb; no longer ago than last autumn he was indicted by the grand jury of Delaware County. The colonel, it is said, didn’t consider this a fair business transaction, and, brushing up the mahogany pistol, he took his coach and hounds, drove up to good old Delaware, and bid defiance to the whole posse comitatus of the county. The greatest men in the country have some time in the course of their lives been indicted. A few weeks later, when Attree, who had left the _Transcript_ to write “horribles” for the _Courier_, was terribly beaten in the street, the _Sun_ denounced the assault and tried to expose the assailants. In February, 1835, a few days after the indictment of the partners, Mr. Wisner was challenged to a duel by a quack dentist whose medicines the _Sun_ had exposed. The _Sun_ announced editorially that Wisner accepted the challenge, and that, having the choice of weapons, he chose syringes charged with the dentist’s own medicine, the distance five paces. No duel! It would seem that the _Sun_ owners sought a challenge from the fiery James Watson Webb of the mahogany pistol, for they made many a dig at his sixpenny paper. Here is a sample: