times playful and sometimes caustic, and the wealth and appositeness of illustration and argument which were the familiar ear-marks of his style. No attempt has been made to include in the present collection, any of these writings of an ephemeral character, from the impossibility, as it seemed to the Committee, of reproducing the personal and local coloring and atmosphere, which gave them at the time, their special interest and effect. They are only alluded to here, in order that the present collection may not be supposed to furnish the full measure of Mr. Wallis's remarkable intellectual activity and fertility. There can be no doubt that his contributions to literature of a durable and permanent character, would have been much more extensive, had not the demands of his profession so fully occupied his time, and taxed so severely a physical strength and constitution which were never robust.

BIOGRAPHICAL.

To the foregoing statement of the origin and scope of this Memorial Publication of Mr. Wallis's writings, it is deemed proper to append a brief sketch of his career, with some few facts relating to his parentage and family and to the place which he held in the State and city where he was born, and lived and died.

Severn Teackle Wallis was born in the city of Baltimore, on the 8th of September, 1816, being the second son of Philip Wallis and Elizabeth Custis Teackle, his wife, daughter of Severn Teackle of Talbot county, Maryland, after whom he was named. Both of Mr. Wallis's parents came of families long-settled upon the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay. His grandfather, Severn Teackle, married February 23d, 1786, Lucretia Edmondson, daughter of Pollard Edmondson of Talbot county. The Edmondsons were descended from John Edmondson, one of the very early Quaker settlers in Maryland, the personal friend and correspondent of

John Fox, the Founder of the Society. Fox, in his Journal (Part second, London, 1709) mentions two visits which he paid to John Edmondson, at his hospitable home on Tredhaven Creek near Easton, on the 18th of July and 3d of August, 1672. John Edmondson was the second Quaker elected to the Colonial Legislature of Maryland. Pollard Edmondson, by whose time, however, the family had become Episcopalians, was also a member of the Colonial Legislature, and a delegate from Talbot county to the Convention of 1776, which framed the first Constitution of the State of Maryland. He was afterwards a member of the State Legislature under that Constitution.

Philip Wallis, the father of Severn Teackle Wallis, was the son and only child of Samuel Wallis of Kent county, where the family was settled in the early part of the 18th century. Inheriting a considerable landed estate in Kent and Queen Anne counties, from his father, young Philip Wallis, after leaving Washington College, Kent County, Maryland, studied law in the office of the Hon. James A. Bayard, in Wilmington, Delaware, but never appears to have practised the profession. After his marriage to Miss Teackle, and the birth of his eldest son, Philip, he removed in 1816 from Easton to Baltimore, where all his other children, four sons and three daughters, were born, and where he lived in a house on North Charles street nearly opposite the Cathedral and the residence of the Archbishop, until he finally removed in 1837 to Mississippi, where he owned a plantation near Yazoo city. He is represented to have been a man of taste and cultivation, and appears to have encouraged the early bent of his son Teackle, towards literature, especially poetry and the classics. He died October 23d, 1844, being killed by the explosion of the boiler of a steamboat on the Ohio river.

On the maternal side, Mr. Wallis was descended from the Reverend Thomas Teackle, a native of Gloucestershire, England, who settled in Accomack county, Virginia, in 1652. He was the son of a Royalist, who was killed in the service of King Charles I, and was the first clergyman of the Established Church of England settled on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. He received grants of land in 1652 and 1668, and his parish at one time

included the whole of Accomack and Northampton counties. His estate, "Craddock," upon which he lived, and where he died and was buried, January 26th, 1695, still retains the name he gave it.

Mr. Wallis's maternal grandfather, Severn Teackle, for whom he was named, was an officer in the Revolutionary army, a lieutenant in 1776 in the 9th Virginia Regiment "on Continental Establishment," a captain in the same regiment in 1779, afterwards transferred to the 5th Regiment, Virginia Line. Captain Teackle was taken prisoner either at Brandywine or Germantown, in which latter engagement his regiment was conspicuous for its gallantry, losing nearly half of its number in killed and wounded. In a memorandum appended by Mr. Wallis, apparently in 1893, to a copy of the "Genealogical Record (MS.) of the Teackle and Edmondson Families" in his possession, he says: "I have not analyzed the record so as to notice whether there were any intermarriages with the Severn family. There was a young gentleman of that name, a lieutenant in the same regiment with my grandfather." The records of the Virginia Land Office show a grant of land in Northampton county to John Severn, on October 8th, 1644, and the intimacy between the Severn family and the descendants of the Reverend Thomas Teackle, appears from the frequency of the use of Severn as a baptismal name in all the families of the Teackle connection, the Upshurs, Eyres, Bowdoins, Parkers and others.

Of a large family consisting, as already mentioned, of five sons and three daughters, Mr. Wallis was for many years prior to his death the sole survivor, with the exception of one brother, who is still living, Mr. John S. Wallis, formerly of New Orleans, but now a resident of Baltimore. Mr. Wallis's father died, as stated, in 1844, his mother in 1852. Of the sons, only the eldest, Philip, and the youngest, John S., ever married. The three daughters died unmarried; the eldest, Miss Elizabeth Custis Wallis, lived with her brother in Baltimore for some years and until her death in 1867.

Mr. Wallis's own life, with the exception of several visits abroad and the period of his enforced absence while a prisoner

during the civil war, was passed mainly in the State of Maryland and the city of Baltimore. There he received both his academic and his professional education; there he made his home and did his life's work. After receiving elementary instruction at a private school, he was entered as a student at St. Mary's College, an institution which was founded in Baltimore in the latter part of the 18th century by members of the Society of St. Sulpice in Paris, who found in this country a refuge from the storms of the French Revolution. It was raised to the rank of a university by Act of the Legislature of Maryland in 1805, and for many years enjoyed a high reputation as a collegiate institution in the United States, Canada, and the neighboring States of Mexico and South America, from all of which it drew a large number of pupils. It exists to-day only as a Seminary for the education and training of young men for the Catholic priesthood, according to the original purpose and design of the Sulpitian Society. At St. Mary's, young Wallis was graduated Bachelor of Arts at the age of sixteen, and two years later was admitted Master of Arts, and in 1841 his Alma Mater conferred upon him the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws.

In 1832, immediately after leaving college, Mr. Wallis began the study of the law in Baltimore, in the office of the celebrated William Wirt, the distinguished orator and jurist, who, from 1817 to 1829, under two Presidents and three administrations, held the office of Attorney General of the United States. Upon the death of Mr. Wirt in 1834, Mr. Wallis continued his studies in the office of Mr. John Glenn, a leading and successful lawyer, who, upon his retirement from the bar many years later, was appointed Judge of the United States District Court. In September, 1837, at the age of twenty-one, Mr. Wallis was admitted to the bar.

While at St. Mary's he had evinced great fondness for and acquired considerable proficiency in the study of the Spanish language and literature, in which pursuit he derived both encouragement and assistance from a highly accomplished Spanish scholar and gentleman, Don José Antonio Pizarro, Spanish ViceConsul at Baltimore, and for many years a professor at St. Mary's, with whom Mr. Wallis kept up a warm friendship and inti

macy, which lasted until Mr. Pizarro's death at a very advanced age. The old gentleman in his youth had been an officer in the Spanish army during the French invasion (1810-1812), and was wounded at the siege of Cadiz. In recognition of his attainments, in 1844, Mr. Wallis had the honor of being elected a corresponding member of the Royal Academy of History at Madrid. This was not, however, the only distinction his reputation as a scholar won for him abroad. In 1846 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Northern Antiquaries at Copenhagen. In 1847, being in somewhat delicate health, which his friends thought would be benefited by a sea-voyage, he was persuaded to go abroad, and for the first time then visited Spain. The fruits of his keen observation and thorough appreciation of what he saw upon this visit, were embodied upon his return in a modest volume bearing the title of Glimpses of Spain; or, Notes of an Unfinished Tour, published by Harper & Brothers in 1849.

The publication of this book, together with Mr. Wallis's already high reputation as a lawyer, doubtless contributed to his selection by the Government at Washington, for an important professional mission. In 1849 he revisited Spain, commissioned by the Secretary of the Interior to examine and report upon the title to public lands in Florida, as affected by Spanish grants made during the pendency of negotiations with this country in 1819. Thus accredited to the Spanish authorities in an official way, and with the familiarity with the country and the people already acquired during his previous visit, Mr. Wallis enjoyed exceptional opportunities for obtaining information not always accessible to the ordinary tourist. His second book on Spain, published upon his return, entitled Spain; Her Institutions, Politics and Public Men, although but "a sketch," as he calls it, contained in a small compass the best account of Spanish politics at that time, and of the then existing constitution of the monarchy, within the reach of English readers.

Mr. Wallis revisited Europe in 1856 and again in 1884, but after his return in 1849, his life for a time passed uneventfully, being devoted almost exclusively to the practice of the law, with occasional excursions into the fields of politics and of literature. His practice was a large and growing one, and as lucrative as