of medium stature, neat in person and pleasant in appearance and address.
In finishing Volume XIII., he had several serials, articles already accepted, and had agreed to complete Campbell's History. Indeed, a large majority of its contributors were bound to hold on to the Messenger and he very soon obtained new ones. One of these is "Ik Marvel," with whose notes of foreign travel he had been much taken.
Just after his greetings for the New Year, 1848, Mrs. Sigourney and Lieut. Maury stand by him. That wonderful Jno. Quincy Adams had asked the lieutenant-superintendent to give a written description of the National Observatory and here it is,—Maury-esque: "Ik" begins very modestly, with "A Man Overboard," less than one page. But how he has developed and expanded as Donald G. Mitchell! In one of his late works, "Queen Anne and the Georges," he gives a sketch of Beckford's Vathek," in which he says: "He reaches at last, in company with the lovely Mironihar, the great hall of Eblis; here we have something horrific and Dantesque—something which I am sure had its abiding influence upon the work of Edgar Poe."
P. P. Cooke furnishes a critique, not unfriendly, upon Poe's prose and poetry, as a sequel to Mr. Lowell's "Memoirs," a few years before. In
