Except the Governorship itself, he filled at one time or another every prominent office in that Province. And when Lt. Gov. Nicholson went to England at the outbreak of Leisler's insurrection and actual usurpation, to report in person to King William, he committed the Government itself in his absence, to Stephanus van Cortlandt and Frederick Philipse. * A fact that caused Leisler, to seek their lives and forced them to escape from the City of New York to save themselves. Space will not permit more than the briefest mention of the events of his career, perhaps the most brilliant and varied in the fiftyseven years it occupied, of any inhabitant of New York in the seventeenth century ; and undoubtedly the first brilliant career that any native of New York ever ran. Born in New Amsterdam in 1643, he was' a youth of twenty-one, when in 1664 the English capture took place and New Amsterdam became New

8 The facts stated in this sketch are found in I. O'Call. 180 and 212. New Netherland Kegister under its several headings, and the II. vol. of the Colonial History. Also in Brodbead's History, both volumes. And the Lookerman's Family Bible in the library of the Bible Society of New York.

* Daughter of the firet Frederick Philipse.

5 III. Col. Hist. 675.

THE ORIGIN AND HISTORY OF THK :\IANORS.

York. Brought up under the eye of his father, and educated by the Dutch clergymen of New Amsterdam, ' whose scliohirship was vastly higher than it has pleased luoderii writers to state, and which would compare favorably with that of the clergy of the nineteenth century, young van Cortlandt long before the death of his father in 1G84, showed how well he had i)r()tited by the e.\anii)le of the one, and the learning of the others.