relate to her grandson, when he came under her care. For the greater part
of this time her husband remained at the country seat in Fishkill, quietly
occupied with his books and the care of his estate. Meantime, she wrote
anxious letters to her father, in Amsterdam, which were answered in neat
French. The banker consoled his daughter by saying that "Mr. Samuel
Verplanck was a man so universally known and honored, both for his
integrity and scholarly attainments, that in the end all would be well."
This proved true; the extensive estate at Fishkill was never confiscated,
and its owner was left unmolested.

On the mother's side, our friend had an ancestry of quite different
political views. His grandfather, William Samuel Johnson, of Stratford, in
Connecticut, was one of the revolutionary fathers. Before the revolution,
he was the agent of Connecticut in England; when it broke out he took a
zealous part in the cause of the revolted colonies; he was a delegate to
Congress from his State when Congress sat in New York, and he aided in
framing the Constitution of the United States. Afterwards, he was
President of Columbia College from the year 1787 to the year 1800, when,
resigning the post, he returned to Stratford, where he died in 1819, at
the age of ninety-two. His father, the great-grandfather of the subject of
this memoir, was Dr. Samuel Johnson, of Stratford, one of the finest
American scholars of his day, and the first President of Columbia College,
which however, he left after nine years, to return and pass a serene old
age at Stratford. He had been a Congregational minister in Connecticut,
but by reading the works of Barrow and other eminent divines of the
Anglican Church, became a convert to that church, went to England, and
taking orders returned to introduce its ritual into Connecticut. He was
the friend of Bishop Berkeley, whose arm-chair was preserved as an
heir-loom in his family. When in England, he saw Pope, who gave him
cuttings from his Twickenham willow. These he brought from the banks of