PREFATORY.

THE following pages present the autobiography of one of the most extraordinary men that ever lived; a man who, in the course of his mere commercial life, has had more and stranger adventures than are given to most professed travellers, and who relates them with a vividness and reality that deserve to give him rank among writers.

His book professes to give the history of fifty years, but the reader will find that it embraces seventy, and makes him acquainted with half the people in the world. In Europe and America, let him wander where he would, he never, in his late years, failed to find an old acquaintance. Men recognized him through the dust-clouds of Odessa, as in the bar-rooms of Natchez under the Hill. Napoleon, at the age of 24, examined him. Victoria has given him private audiences. He watched the rise and fall of Louis Philippe, after witnessing the accomplishment of the catastrophe of the Restoration. He has doffed his hat to Ferdinand of Austria, in Trieste, and shaken hands with the savage kings west of the Mississippi.

He was a German citizen of the United States, born in Italy, and lived all over. He built flat-boats at Pittsburgh, for the navigation of the Ohio, and shouted among the crowd who cheered Robert Fulton's steamboat, as she first started from the wharf at New York. He has been wrecked off the coast of Florida, and imprisoned in the Queen's Bench, at London. He was suspected of having the plague at Malta, and had the yellow fever in New Orleans. He peeped into the crater of Etna, and was shaken by the earthquake at Louisville. Napoleon's whole career and Aaron Burr's conspiracy are made a couple of items in his extraordinary existence.

This Yankee cotton speculator arranged the conversion of a loan for his holiness the Pope. This confidential adviser of the Austrian premier Von Kuebeck was a soldier of General Jackson, at the battle of New Orleans. This commissary of Louis Philippe and Duke Charles of Brunswick, was the intimate friend of the republican Lafayette. This lover of Livornese opera girls was mingled in the plans of Nicholas Biddle. This handler and possessor of untold thousands, of millions of money, lived on bread and cheese in Venice; and to get even that much, translated some English title-deeds for the monks of San Lorenzo.

The very names in this volume are wonderful. Kings, Emperors, Presidents and Popes jostle each other through its pages. Poets and painters are criticised and gossipped about-Chantrey and Nollekens, Delaroche and Delacroix, Nerly and Landseer. Now you have a story of Göthe, and again an anecdote of Chateaubriand. Byron and Lamartine, Kotzebue and Cooper come quite familiarly to the tip of his pen, and when tired of telling what he knows about these, he writes verses himself-verses of great mediocrity.

One of the richest of modern merchants, and most daring of speculators, he yet never neglected his love for art nor his talent with the crayon. When his commercial greatness had culminated and waned, he became everything by turns-commissary for arms and provisions; agent for a machine to engrave circular lines; editor of the little free port newspaper of Hamburgh; political squib writer in the United States; clerk in a third-class house of business; translator of manuscript for Italian friars.

Vain, amusing, garrulous, scandalous old fellow; with the dryest common sense, that is not to be tricked; with the keenest eye for a defect, either in person or character, and a bitter or comic humor to help him in describing it, Mr. Vincent Nolte presents to our eyes one of the most curious life-panoramas that it is possible to see.

You must take his personalities, especially about people here, cum grano salis. He seldom looks at the bright side of a character, and dearly loves-le confesses it—a bit of scandal. But he paints well, describes well, seizes characteristics which make clear to the reader the nature of the man whom they illustrate.

The amount of really useful information, historical, commercial, artistic, and personal, in this work, is immense; and it is so interspersed with anecdote and adventure, with variety and scandal "of a pleasant tartness," that all heaviness is destroyed, and the book is as delightful as a novel.

We expect, of course, from the reading world, even more than a usual warmth of welcome for this entertaining work.

THE TRANSLATOR.

INTRODUCTION.

KIND READER! whatever the chance that has given me the right to address you, and has placed this book in your hands, I must, of necessity, look for you in one of the three following categories:

Either you belong to that very large number of indivi duals who, up to the present time, have neither known, heard, nor read any thing about me:

Or, to the smaller number who have, only here and there, cast a glance at the proofs of my literary activity; but are, still, altogether unacquainted with me and the events of my life:

Or, finally; to those who, under the inevitable condition of incomplete or untrue representations, have become more or less acquainted with me, have heard all sorts of things about me, or have learned, at least, my name.

From each and every member of these three classes I may expect the question: What are you going to offer us, when, in the title of your book, you speak of the Reminiscences of a Former Merchant, extracted from the History of a Life which has embraced the first half of the present century? Do you merely intend to narrate the mercantile observation and experience of a man wholly given up to

commercial pursuits; or have we to deal with one whom his business-occupations have not prevented from looking carefully at things around him and noting the great events of his time, nor from obtaining personal information and availing himself of opportunities to observe distinguished characters, both in and out of his own calling, one who has been able to form and retain unprejudiced views, and has, during his own career, experienced the ups and downs of fortune, the vicissitudes of human existence and the consequences of human error? Should your inquiries, dear reader, embody the last words I have used, you have, indeed, hit the nail on the head, since they convey precisely the tenor of much the greater portion of the historical and biographical sketches you will find in this work. Truth, and not poetry, composes the contents of the book you now hold in your hand.

Neither the private individual nor the business-man who gives extracts from his biography over to publicity, can often escape the suspicion of inordinate vanity and a blind overestimate of his own merit or of the part he has played in society. As feelings of that kind have not exerted any influence, in the present case, it is my duty to say a word regarding the motive in which these pages have had their real origin.

If, out of the panoramic whirl of my varying fortunes and experiences, no other recollections remained to me than such as have reference to the life of a merchant, solely, you might well conclude, dear reader, after what I have said above, that I should never have so far yielded to the numerous and repeated solicitations of many friends and acquaintances on both sides of the Ocean, who have long been