MEMOIRS OF GEORGE FREDERICK COOKE; BIOGRAPHY OF CHARLES
BROCKDEN BROWN; HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN THEATRE ;

AND HISTORY OF THE RISE AND PROGRESS OF THE ARTS
OF DESIGN IN THE UNITED STATES.

"I think of as many matters as he; but I give Heaven thanks and make no
boast of them."

"Of two hundred and thirteen convicts received at the State Prison of Sing
Sing, during the year 1835, ninety-six were of the State of New-York; and of
these one-third were foreigners. Two-thirds of the tax paid by the community,
is for pauperism and crime produced by intemperance."

IN TWO VOLUMES.

VOL. I.

NEW-YORK:

PUBLISHED BY BANCROFT & HOLLEY,

BROADWAY, ASTOR'S HOTEL, No. 8.

ENTERED, according to the Act of Congress, in the year 1836, by WILLIAM DENLAP, in the Clerk's office of the District Court of the Southern District of New-York.

DEDICATED

TO ALL

TEMPERANCE SOCIETIES.

PREFACE.

I PROFESS to give my readers a novel. That is, something new. And I will give them something new; notwithstanding we are truly told that "there is nothing new under the sun"—and it might be added, neither is the sun new.

These seeming contradictions are perhaps thus to be reconciled: that although all is old-in nature a mere repetition of a rising sun in the east and a setting sun in the west―a spring, a summer, an autumn, and a winter, going their rounds yearly, in most habitable countries; and that, in literature, it is "a pouring out of one vessel into another :"-yet, as the successive generation of individuals, or nations, come into existence, that, which is of itself old, is to them new.

Nay, to the same individual, that sun, so often seen, is daily varied by situation in the firmament, and presents every hour a new face, as the mist or the cloud changes the medium through which we behold him: so the landscape, although seen every day, is never the same, either in appearance or reality. The truths or falsehoods of literature, although the same materials may be apparently poured from "one vessel into another," produce novelty by the mixture; for each operator has a different mode of mingling the ingredients