Rensselaer Republican, Volume 12, Number 27, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 March 1880 — PERSONAL AND LITERARY. [ARTICLE]

PERSONAL AND LITERARY.

Mrs. Frank Leslie is managing her late husband’s publications. Mr. Moody, the evangelist, never rides in the street can on Sunday. Mr. LsNQfellow was seventy-three years old on the 27th of February. It is reported that Minister Andrew D. White is suffering from the climate of Berlin and wants to come home. Senator Lamar is said to owe his illness to his irregular habits of eating. At times he almost starves himself, and at other times he eats voraciously. General Robert E. Lee had a pew in the old Christ Church in Alexandria, Va., where Washington once worshipped; and every button has been taken from the cushions by curiosity hunters. A recent visitor to Jefferson Davis, on his farm at Beauvoir, says that he is hard at work on his memoirs, his cotton crop for next season will reach one thousand bales, and his wife and nephew. General Joseph Davis, are with him. Mrs. Jennie Smith, of Jersey City, who has just been acquitted of the charge of murder, after having been once sentenced to death, has had a lecture written for her and is about to deliver it. It is called “At the Foot of the Gallows.” Senator Edmunds says, regarding the action of the Vermont Republican Convention in naming him as a suftable candidate for President, that he would not take the nomination if it were tendered. His aspirations lie in the direction of the Supreme Bench. Mr. Longfellow is said to write easily but very slowly, weighing every word before jotting it down in lead Eencil. There is hardly an erasure in is manuscript, but when his work returns from him in proof hardly anything of its original form is left. It is asserted that “ The Divine Trtgedy” was rewritten after the most of it was in type. A miserly old man of Philadelphia, whose estate is valued at a quarter of a million dollars, has been ordered to pay fifteen dollars a week for his wife’s support. She brought a suit, complaining that she had been compelled to live on potatoes, mush and sour milk, and was ill-treated by her husband and daughters. She demanded a, comfortable subsistence out of the estate, as she had helped in its accumulation by attending market for years, rain or shine, and selling the produce of a farm. Sir Edward Thornton, the British Minister at Washington, has now served there twelve years, only one year less than his father, who passed thirteen years in the British diplomatic service in this country. Mr. Edward Thornton, the father, was first Vice-Consul in Baltimore and afterward was in Washington as Secretary of Legation with Mr. Hammond, the first Minister sent to our Government by England. Afterward the elder Thornton was Charge d' Affaires of the Brititish Legation here. A CORRESPONDENT of the Newburyport (Mass.) Herald relates that just before the rebellion Caleb Cushing was asked to contribute to the building of a free Protestent Episcopal Church in a neglected part of Washington, D. C. Mr. Cushing granted tiffs request by deeding a city lot. During the confusion attending the war the' land was sold for city taxes. Mr. Cushing bought the property, which in the meantime had doubled in value. He sold the land and gave to the parish $4,000, which was one-half the sum received from the sale and the amount he originally intended for the benefit of the church. Encouraged by this liberality, a stone church was put up instead of a frame building, as at first intended.