VOL. II.

The two health officers, believers
In Clinton and contagious fevers?

The keeper of the city's treasures,

The sealer of her weights and measures?
The harbor-master, her best bower
Cable in party's stormy hour?

Ten auctioneers, three bank directors,
And Mott and Duffy, the inspectors
Of whisky and of flour?

It was but yesterday they stood
All (ex officio) great and good-
But by the tomahawk struck down
Of party, and of Walter Bowne,
Where are they now?-With shapes of air,
The caravan of things that were,
Journeying to their nameless home,
Like Mecca's pilgrims from her tomb-
With the lost Pleiad-with the wars
Of Agamemnon's ancestors-

With their own years of joy and grief,
Spring's bud and autumn's faded leaf,
With birds that round their cradles flew,
With winds that in their boyhood blew,
With last night's dream and last night's dew.

Yes, they are gone, alas! each one of them,
Departed, every mother's son of them.
Yet often, at the close of day,

When thoughts are winged and wandering, they
Come with the memory of the past,

Like sunset clouds along the wind
Reflecting, as they're flitting fast,

In their wild hues of shade and light,
All that was beautiful and bright,

In golden moments left behind.

BIOGRAPHY OF JACOB HAYS.*

BY WILLIAM COX.

He is a man, take him for all in all,

We shall not look upon his like again.-Shaks.

Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce to your acquaintance, Baron Nabem, a person who has a very taking way with him.-Tom and Jerry.

PERHAPS there is no species of composition so generally interesting and truly delightful as minute and indiscriminate biography, and it is pleasant to perceive how this taste is gradually increasing. The time is apparently not far distant when every man will be found busy writing the life of his neighbor, and expect to have his own written in return ; interspersed with original anecdotes, extracts from epistolary correspondence, the exact hours at which he was in the habit of going to bed at night and getting up in the morning, and other miscella neous and useful information carefully selected and judiciously arranged. Indeed, it is whispered that the editors of this papert intend to take Longworth's

*This was written during an awful prevalence of biographies. †The New-York Mirror.

Directory for the groundwork, and give the private history of all the city alphabetically, without "fear or favor-love or affection." In Europe there exists an absolute biographical mania, and they are manufacturing lives of poets, painters, play-actors, peers, pugilists, pickpockets, horse-jockeys, and their horses, together with a great many people that are scarcely known to have existed at all. And the fashion now is not only to shadow forth the grand and striking outlines of a great man's character, and hold to view those qualities which elevated him above his species, but to go into the minutiæ of his private life, and note down all the trivial expressions and every-day occurrences in which, of course, he merely spoke and acted like any ordinary man. This not only affords employment for the exercise of the small curiosity and meddling propensities of his officious biographer, but is also highly gratifying to the general reader, inasmuch as it elevates him mightily in his own opinion to see it put on record that great men ate, drank, slept, walked, and sometimes talked just as he does. In giving the biography of the high constable of this city, I shall by all means avoid descending to undignified particulars; though I deem it important to state, before proceeding further, that there is not the slightest foundation for the report afloat that Mr. Hays has left off eating buckwheat cakes in a morning, in consequence of their lying too heavily on his stomach.

Where the subject of the present memoir was

born, can be but of little consequence; who were his father and mother, of still less; and how he was bred and educated, of none at all. I shall therefore pass over this division of his existence in eloquent silence, and come at once to the period when he attained the acmé of constabulatory power and dignity by being created high constable of this city and its suburbs; and it may be remarked, in passing, that the honorable the corporation, during their long and unsatisfactory career, never made an appointment more creditable to themselves, more beneficial to the city, more honorable to the country at large, more imposing in the eye of foreign nations, more disagreeable to all rogues, nor more gratifying to honest men, than that of the gentleman whom we are biographizing, to the high office he now holds. His acuteness and vigilance have become proverbial; and there is not a misdeed committed by any member of this community, but he is speedily admonished that he will "have old Hays (as he is affectionately and familiarly termed) after him." Indeed, it is supposed by many that he is gifted with supernatural attributes, and can see things that are hid from mortal ken; or how, it is contended, is it possible that he should, as he does,

"Bring forth the secret'st man of blood?"

That he can discover "undivulged crime”—that when a store has been robbed, he, without stop or hesitation, can march directly to the house where the goods are concealed, and say, "these are they"

-or, when a gentleman's pocket has been picked, that, from a crowd of unsavory miscreants he can, with unerring judgment, lay his hand upon one and exclaim, "you're wanted!"-or how is it that he is gifted with that strange principle of ubiquity that makes him "here and there and everywhere" at the same moment? No matter how, so long as the public reap the benefit; and well may that public apostrophize him in the words of the poet :

66

'Long may he live! our city's pride!

Where lives the rogue, but flies before him!

With trusty crabstick by his side,

And staff of office waving o'er him."

But it is principally as a literary man that we would speak of Mr. Hays. True, his poetry is "unwritten," as is also his prose; and he has invariably expressed a decided contempt for philosophy, music, rhetoric, the belles lettres, the fine arts, and in fact all species of composition excepting bailiffs' warrants and bills of indictment-but what of that? The constitution of his mind is, even unknown to himself, decidedly poetical. And here I may be allowed to avail myself of another peculiarity of modern biography, namely, that of describing a man by what he is not. Mr. Hays has not the graphic power or antiquarian lore of Sir Walter Scott-nor the glittering imagery or voluptuous tenderness of Moore-nor the delicacy and polish of Rogers-nor the spirit of Campbell-nor the sentimentalism of Miss Landon-nor the depth and purity of thought and intimate acquaintance with