Owing to its attacks on the government of Kieft and Stuyvesant, Van der Donck was denied access to the colonial records during the preparation of his " Description of New Netherland," which has been translated and occupies one hundred and six pages of the "New York Historical Society's Collections," 1841. It describes the rural products, animals and inhabitants of the colony. The date of the first edition is unknown. The second was published at Amsterdam, in 1656, by Ebert Nieuwenhof, who introduced the work with a poetical preface.

Right Rev. Samuel Seabury, D.D., first bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church, may be classed among the literary men of Westchester, from the fact that, while in charge of St. Peter's Church, Westchester, he wrote and published, anonymously, during the Revolutionary period, a series of pamphlets in defense of the crown, under the signature, it is said, of " A. W. Farmer." He was the son of Rev. Samuel Seabury, missionary of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, at New London, Conn., and was born at Croton, November 30, 1729, and graduated at Yale in 1748. He then went to Scotland to study medicine, but while in that country also devoted his attention to theology, and was ordained by

LITERATUllE AND LITEllARY MEN.

the Bisliop of London in 1758, and, on his return, settled at New Jkunswiek, N. J., as a missionary of tlie rroi)agation Society. In 1757 he removed to Jamaica, and from thence, in 1766, to Westchester, where, in addition to his church, he had charge of a sciiool. The authorship of tlie '" Farmer " pamphlets, which were commonly attributed to him, caused him to be seized by the Whigs, in 1775, and carried to New Haven, where he was imprisoned. As the fact of the authorship could not be established by legal proof, he was suffered to return to Westches er, where he renewed his efforts in behalf of the Loyalist cause.