took it from the English in 1673 and held it until news of the peace of Westminster. It is curious enough now to consider that the exchange of Surinam for New York by the treaty of Breda in 1667 was at the time considered a losing bargain for the English, and supposed to exhibit on the part of their rivals that craving and exorbitant tendency celebrated a century and a half later by Canning in the famous distich,—
In matters of commerce the fault of the Dutch
Is giving too little and asking too much.
The second Dutch name, of New Amsterdam, which it was to bear for less than two years, was given, it appears, in order to signalize the fact that, although the island was again Dutch, the West India Company had no claim to any share in its reconquest or repossession, and that it was now an appanage of the Prince of Orange. The inhabitants of the patroonate of Pauw, elegantly Latinized into Pavonia, like most of the burghers of Manhattan, no more mingled in politics than the respectable inhabitants of the island do at this day, and regarded
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GRACIE'S CASTLE, EAST RIVER, NEW YORK.
"the drums and tramplings of three conquests" with the equanimity of their own mild-eyed cattle. Paulus Hook and the lowlands of Communipaw underwent a secular change from a collection of outlying bouweries to "a place where people go to see other people go to Europe," which was defined to be the modern function of Jersey City until it was deprived of this excuse for existence by the removal of the steamers to the metropolitan shore, and became to most New Yorkers merely an incident of the journey to Philadelphia. Every one of the phases by which this evolution has been accomplished was accompanied by the effacing of all the monuments of the previous states, and one may search the marshy lowlands of Communipaw in vain for anything denoting that they were ever inhabited by other races than the contemporaneous Jersey-man. It is a familiar fact, however, that a few hundred feet of elevation may preserve a region from change more than miles of level distance. Upon Bergen Hill, accordingly, as it is tautologically called, or Jersey City Heights, within cannon-shot of Wall Street, there is more to recall the primitive condition of Manhattan than can be found upon the island itself. As one stands upon the summit of the padded eminence into which the rocky ridge of the Palisades declines before it disappears under the Kills to emerge in Staten Island, although looking eastward the underbrush of masts and the forest of spires and roofs show him a modern commercial city, looking westward over the marshes the prospect is very much the same that was presented to the primitive Dutchmen who first climbed here and "looked at each other with a wild surmise," asking
