Stricken with grief!—ah! sad and cruel blow!
Behold the matron in a fury blue,
Beating her screaming Bobby with a shoe!
Our esteemed friend, John Sanderson, the distinguished ‘American in Paris,’ whom the readers of this Magazine have known so long, and regarded so highly, is no more! Sad indeed is the task of recording the demise of a scholar so profound, a gentleman so accomplished, and a man so widely admired and beloved. Sanderson was a delightful companion; and as we record this hasty tribute to his memory, we cannot help recalling the many pleasant passages, personal and epistolary, that we have had together. A correspondent of the Philadelphia Gazette, who knew him well, furnishes the following notice of the deceased, in the justice of which all who knew him will cordially concur:
‘John Sanderson was a man of genius, a man of talent, a man of feeling. He was a Philadelphian, and by his life and writings he added to the good reputation of his country. To natural abilities of a high order, he added a calm, chaste scholarship, an intimate knowledge of mankind, a singularly amiable disposition, and a frank and high-bred courtesy. His departure is lamented not alone by those who enjoyed his society and his friendship; he is mourned by our republic of letters; America as well as our city, has lost one of her most accomplished sons. Mr. Sanderson has long been known as a writer. His first publication was the collection of Memoirs of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence, in nine octavo volumes; a work embracing a vast amount of original and authentic information; and his last, excepting contributions to the literary journals, was ‘The American in Paris.’ He was a man of most excellent humor, blending happily the characteristics of Rabalais and Sterne and Lamb. When with his chosen associates, we doubt whether even Coleridge was more entertaining or instructive. Turn to his Parisian letters and see the union of wit and humor, of playful satire and nice observation which pervade them. Examine all the pleasant books of travel of which this age has been so prolific, and answer whether they have been surpassed. ‘You know Sanderson,’ we said a few weeks since to a French Deputy who was travelling here. ‘Know John Sanderson? I derived from him my knowledge of Paris.’ ‘But you are a Parisian?’ ‘Je ne sache pas qu’il y ait eu un Français qui ait plus connu Paris et son monde.’ In that home of the gay, the brilliant and the profound, of all that in life or art attracts the man of genius, or learning, or taste, Mr. Sanderson was the favored guest of the most celebrated savans and wits, many of whom since his return to the United States, have waited anxiously for his restoration to their circles. And he himself looked forward with happy anticipations to the renewal of his old friendships. In a few months he was to reöccupy his apartments in the Rue Rivoli. ‘There,’ he said to the writer of these recollections but a week ago, ‘there with congenial spirits I shall spend the residue of my days.’ How much those friends will sorrow when they learn that John Sanderson is no more!
He was a wit; he had a most delicate perception of the beautiful, and a keen sense of the ludicrous. But those who knew him can tell with what care he directed his powers. He never summoned a shadow to any face, or permitted a weight to lie on any heart. He was as amiable as he was brilliant. He was no man of the world. He knew society, its selfishness and its want of honor, but he looked upon it less in anger than in sadness. He was no cynic, no Heraclitus; he deemed it wisest to laugh at the follies of mankind. Through all his experience he lost none of his natural urbanity, his freshness of feeling, his earnestness and sincerity. The late Theodore Hook, the first humorist and most celebrated bon-vivant of our day, was employed by his publisher to edit Mr. Sanderson’s ‘American in Paris.’ He read it, adapted it as well as he could to the English market, and returned it with the observation that ‘there was never a book which suffered more from slightest change.’ Had the author devoted the chief portion of his time to letters, he would have been little less distinguished in the same department than his famous friend. But he lived a quieter and happier life; he died a happier death, suddenly, but in a home, and with his friends about him.’
The following ‘Lines to a Bouquet of Flowers,’ are from the pen of the lamented Governor Dickinson, whose melancholy suicide will be fresh in the minds of many of our readers. We learn from the friend through whom we derive them, that they were handed to him by the author, while sojourning for a short time in Albany:
Emblem of life and loveliness,
Welcome, sweet harbingers of Spring!
Clad in thy beauteous summer dress,
And wafted on Time’s fairy wing.