There were many lesser writers and men of cultivated taste in literature and art in the closing years of the Knickerbocker period, who formed a congenial society in the growing city, and, in some cases, made important contributions to the scholarship of their time and secured local reputation and influence.
Gulian Crommelin Verplanck was a fine type of the old-time gentleman of colonial descent. After his graduation from Columbia College he studied law, made the “grand tour,” which was not only a part of a liberal education in those days but an enterprise of an adventurous character, returned to become a dignified professor in what is now the General Theological Seminary, spent eight years in Congress, and for nearly fifty years was Vice-Chancellor of the State University. He had a happy faculty of dignified address on public occasions, was a contributor to the “Talisman” with Bryant, edited an illustrated edition of Shakespeare, and appears to have been regarded by the gay spirits of Cockloft Hall as a person not quite of their kind. Older men, however, held him in great esteem, Bryant reports, as “an example of steady, studious, and spotless youth.” His protest against Irving’s presentation of the founders of Manhattan would seem to indicate that his sense of humor was not always keen.
Frederick S. Cozzens, whose “Sparrowgrass Papers” later achieved a brilliant local reputation, has left a characterization of Dr. John Wakefield Francis, a physician of considerable professional distinction, strong literary interests, and much given to hospitality, which stands in no need of amplification: “The Doctor is one of our old Knickerbockers. His big, bushy head is as familiar as the City Hall. He belongs to the ‘God bless you, my dear young friend’ school. He is as full of knowledge as an egg is full of meat. He knows more about China than the Emperor of the Celestial Empire.”
A fleeting figure in the Knickerbocker town was the author of “Home, Sweet Home,” a song of such popularity that Foster’s songs are its only rivals. It was one of the ironies of life that John Howard Payne should spend his days in exile and die beyond the seas. He was born at No. 33 Pearl Street in 1791, became a clerk in a counting-room at fourteen, and a semi-professional editor while in his teens; though his connection with the “Thespian Mirror,” a local journal devoted to the drama, was kept secret. He spent two terms in Union College, but the stage was calling him, and in 1809—a year memorable for the extraordinary number of men of genius it brought to birth—he played the once popular part of Young Norval on the boards of the Park Theatre. Three years later he was playing with moderate success in English theatres, and a little later adapting and writing plays in Paris, drawing his material chiefly from French sources. The song which was to give him a world-wide reputation was written in a room in the Palais Royal for his play, “Clari; or, The Maid of Milan.” He died at Tunis in 1852, and thirty years later “Home, Sweet Home” was sung by a host of people gathered in Washington about the grave in which his body was reinterred. Payne had talents of an uncommon order; men of the quality and distinction of Talma, Coleridge, and Lamb were warmly attached to him; his work was rewarded with generous returns in money; but he was always in financial straits and seems to have lacked the happy faculty of making himself at home in the world.
Other men less fugitive than Payne, though of purely local fame, contributed to the good-fellowship of the later Knickerbocker period. Charles P. Clinch wrote plays, poems, and criticisms; held public office; and became the devoted friend of Halleck and Drake. “The Spy,” “The First of May,” “The Expelled Collegians,” and an address prepared for the opening of the Park Theatre, testify to his industry, but failed to give his reputation more than local and passing importance.
The informal fellowship of the early Knickerbockers gave way to the earliest literary and artistic clubs. Of one of the earliest of these Robert Charles Sands was a member. The “Sketch Club” included Bryant, Halleck, Verplanck, Cole, Ingham, Durand, Weir, and other practitioners of the arts. The “Century Association,” which has been intimately associated with the literary, artistic, and professional life of New York, was organized at a meeting of the “Sketch Club” in 1847. Sands was a poet and journalist, a warm-hearted, kindly humorist. A more vigorous personality was William Leggett, who began his professional life in the navy, while still a young man published a volume of poems in New York, wrote with great ardor for the periodicals of the day, and finally became one of the editors of the “Evening Post.” He was a man of the old-time belligerent type, and fought a duel of much local notoriety at Weehawken, where the most famous and tragic duel ever fought on American soil had taken place in 1804.
The most popular member of the later Knickerbocker group was Charles Fenno Hoffman, who had a happy faculty of song and verse writing. The lasting popularity of “Sparkling and Bright” needs no explanation; while the verses on the battle of Monterey have a ring of genuine emotion and a force of spirited action which carry them in spite of awkward lines:
We were not many—we who stood
Before the iron sleet that day;
Yet many a gallant spirit would