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MISS LESLIE'S LIFE OF JOHN FITCH.

It has been announced for years that Miss Leslie--the very clever but
not altogether amiable magazinist--was engaged upon a memoir of JOHN
FITCH, to whom, it has always seemed to us, was due much more than
to Fulton, the credit of inventing the steamboat. While Fitch was in
London, Miss Leslie's father was one of his warmest friends, and
the papers of her family enable her to give many particulars of his
history unknown to other biographers. When several years ago. R.W.
Griswold published his Sketches of the Life and Labors of John Fitch,
the late Noah Webster sent him the following interesting letter upon
the subject:

DEAR SIR:--In your sketch of John Fitch you justly remarked
that his biography is still a desideratum. The facts related
of him by Mr. St. John to Mr. Stone, and published in the _New
York Commercial Advertiser_, are new to me; and never before
had I heard of Mr. Fitch at _Sharon_, in Connecticut; but
I know Mr. St. John very well, and cannot discredit his
testimony any more than I can Mr. Stone's memory. The
substance of the account given of Mr. Fitch by the
indefatigable J.W. Barber, in his Connecticut Historical
Collections, is as follows: John Fitch was born in East
Windsor, in Connecticut, and apprenticed to Mr. Cheney, a
watch and clock-maker, of East Hartford, now Manchester, a
new town separated from East Hartford. He married, but did not
live happily with his wife, and he left her and went to New