THE RECORDER.
(1) Page 161.—Richard Riker.—The Recorder of the city at the date of the poem. A gentleman of great merit, who had previously filled, and continued to fill through life, offices of the highest trust. In the poem he is sportively made to appear, not in his excellent and estimable personal character, but as the “burden of a merry song”—the embodied representative of a party leader, and of party men in general, in their proverbial obnoxiousness. Like the scape-goat of antiquity, he is forced to bear the sins of others, not his own, and is “sent out into the wilderness of criticism,” with a heavy load of them upon his innocent shoulders. In the duel alluded to on page 162, which took place early in his political career, the result of a political difference of opinion between him and his antagonist, General Robert Swartwout, Mr. Riker was slightly wounded.
(2) Page 165.—A sculptor, rather mechanical than artistic, famous, for a time, for moulding the busts of notorious men into the immortality of plaster in lieu of marble.
(3) Page 165.—“Garden Flowers.”—An allusion to those of Mr. William Prince, near Flushing, Long Island.
(4) Page 169.—A favorite French air. In English, “Where can one be more happy than in the bosom of one’s family?”
(5) Page 169.—Nathaniel Pitcher, then Governor of the State, accused, in like manner, of being under the political control of Martin Van Buren, then on his way to the presidency of the United States.
(6) Page 169.—“Burgundy and Business.”—Mr. Riker was a director in the Tradesmen’s Bank, and “ex officio” a visitor to the Sing-Sing Prison, the Bellevue Hospital, etc., and was accused, by his party opponents, of making the civic and social meetings there, of himself and his colleagues, subservient to party purposes.
(7) Page 169.—The “Pewter Mug.”—The sign conspicuous over the door of a tavern in Frankfort Street, in the rear of Tammany Hall, the frequent resort of politicians in general, and of the Tammany-Hall party in particular.
(8) Page 170.—An allusion to Philip Hone, then the late Mayor of the city, recently, by the party rule of rotation, displaced from an office in which for several preceding years he had won, by his conduct as an upright magistrate, and a noble and generous man, “honor, love, obedience, troops of friends,” from the highest as well as from the humblest of his constituents.
