Many an elderly man will remember with pleasure and no small degree of gratitude America's first landscape-gardener, -- first in eminence ifnot in time, -- Andrew Jackson Downing. He had two qualities that are not always combined in one individual, namely, artistic sensibility and practical sense. The latter enabled him to make the former effective. Before his day we are led to believe that in the laying out of rural estates, grotesque and chaotic arrangement of natural material was the rule rather than the exception. Mr. Downing not only possessed taste and sense, but he managed to impart them to others, and in the exercise of his chosen profession became widely and favourably known, especially to residents of the Hudson Ri\'er towns.

278 The Hudson River

His books were .4 Treatise on the TJieory and Practice ofLandscape Gardening and Fruit and Fruit Trees of America, both of them widely read. He was for some time the editor of The Horticultiiralist, pubhshed in Allianv. Mr. Downing was one of those who met death on the steamer Henry Clay, that was burned at Riverdale in 1852. From 1830 to 1842, while the Knickerbocker authors w^ere stiU many of them in the hey-day of their powers, and a new generation of writers were just commencing to be heard, Dr. George W. Bethune w^as the pastor of the Reformed Church at Rhinebeck. He will be remembered as a scholarly man of sweet, rare character. His contributions to Christian hymnology possibly constitute his chief claim to remembrance, though he devoted nearly twenty years of his life to public speaking and writing. While James K. Polk was President, Doctor Bethune was offered the appointment to the chair of Moral Philosophy at West Point, which he felt obliged to decline, as he also did the chancellorship of New York University, to which he was chosen as the successor of Mr.