There the " Lads of Kilkenny" used to hold their informal meetings, as partly told in the Salmagundi papers. Peter Irving and Henry Ogden were both members of that convivial nine, and long afterwards the former alluded in a letter to " the procession in the Chinese saloon, in which we made poor Dick McCall a knight; and I, as the senior of our order, dubbed him by some fatality on the seat of honour instead of the shoulder." There was a sort of general family connection ])etween several of those companions. Kemble 's sister, Gertrude, was afterwards the wife of James K. Paulding, while the Paulding and Irving families were also allied by marriage. Paulding was by birth a Dutchess County boy, of Dutch ancestry, whose first widely known work was done in conjunction with Washington Irving, in the Salmagundi papers. In the course of a long life he wrote voluminously, both in prose and verse, though little of his work is familiar to the general reader of to-day. He had a dry and caustic humour, little understood or appreciated by the more serious critics of his day. Novels, histories, fables and allegories, poems and satirical comments upon most of the public questions of the moment flowed from his almost too

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facile pen. Having filled various honourable offices in his native State, he was appointed Secretary of the Navy during the Van Buren administration. His home, near Hyde Park, where he passed in retirement the final years of a busy life, is described in another chapter. In the effervescent period of Cockloft Hall and Salmagundi, his familiar nickname was Billy Taylor, from a song that he was fond of singing upon festive occasions. Closely connected with Irving, in that circle of writers that we are wont to group under the general title of Knickerbocker, were, among others, Fitz- Greene Halleck, Charles Fenno Hoffman, Jose])h Rodman Drake, Nathaniel Parker Willis, General George P.