WILLLIAM D. GALLAGHER.

[Born, 1808.]

was discontinued on the completion of the third semi-annual volume.

Mr. GALLAGHER had now been for ten years the most industrious literary man in the valley of the Mississippi, and had done much for the extension and refinement of literary culture, but his labors were neither justly appreciated nor ade

ed, near the close of 1839, an offer by the late Mr. CHARLES HAMMOND, to share with him the editorship of the "Cincinnati Gazette." With this important journal he retained his connection until the whigs came into power in 1849, when his friend Mr. CORWIN, on being appointed Secretary of the Treasury, conferred on him the post of confidential clerk in that department, and be took up his residence in Washington. On the breaking up of the whig administration, in 1853, he removed to Louisville, Kentucky, where he was for several months one of the editors of the Daily Courier;" but the manly earnestness with which he denounced the crime of the jurors who acquitted the notorious murderer, MATTHEW WARD, led to some disagreement between him and his partner, and he has since resided on a plantation a few miles from that city.

WILLIAM D. GALLAGHER, the third of four sons of an Irishman who came to this country soon after the rebellion, near the close of the last century, and married a native of New Jersey, was born in Philadelphia, in 1808, and in 1816 migrated with his widowed mother to Cincinnati, which was then a filthy and unhealthy village. For three years he lived with a farmer in the neighborhood, attend-quately rewarded, and he therefore gladly accepting a district school in the winters, and in 1825 was apprenticed to the printer of one of the Cincinnati newspapers. From the beginning of his life in the printing office he wrote occasionally for the press, but preserved the secret of his literary habits until 1828, when the late Mr. BENJAMIN DRAKE made it known that he was the author of a series of letters from Kentucky and Missouri, which were attracting considerable attention in his Saturday Evening Chronicle." This led in 1830 to Mr. GALLAGHER'S connection with "The Backwoodsman," a political journal published at Xenia, where he resided about a year. In 1831 he was married, and became editor of "The Cincinnati Mirror," the first literary gazette conducted with much tact or taste in the western states. At the end of two years, the late Mr. THOMAS H. SHREVE joined him in its management, and it remained under their direction, through varying fortunes, until 1836. In that year Mr. GALLAGHER edited "The Western Literary Journal and Monthly Review," of which but one volume was published, and in 1837 "The Western Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal," which had a similarly brief existence. In 1838 he was associated with a younger brother in a political newspaper at Columbus, the capital of the state, and there established 66 The Hesperian, a Monthly Miscellany of General Literature," in which, during its first half year, he was assisted by the late Mr. OTWAY CURRY. "The Hesperian" shared the fate of all previous literary magazines in the west, and

The Western Review and Miscellaneous Magazine," by WILLIAM GIBLES HUNT, was commenced in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1829, and published two years. "The Westeru Monthly Review," by the Rev. TIMOTHY FLINT, was com menced in Cincinnati, in 1827, and published three years. "The Illinois Monthly Magazine," was commenced by Judge JAMES HALL, at Vandalia, Illinois, in 1829, and hav. ing been published there two years, was removed to Cincinnati, where it appeared under the title of "The Western Monthly Magazine," until 1836, when it was discontinued. "The Western Quarterly Review," from which the facts in this article are mainly derived, was another illustration of the indifference with which the western people regard western literature. The first number appeared in January, 1849, and the second and last in the following April. The only successful literary periodical yet published in the val ley of the Mississippi has been "The Ladies' Repository," a monthly magazine issued under the patronage of the

The poems of Mr. GALLAGHER are numerous, various, and of very unequal merit. Some are exquisitely modulated and in every respect finished with excellent judgment, while others are inharmonious, inelegant, and betray unmistakeable signs of carelessness. His most unstudied performances, however, are apt to be forcible and picturesque, fragrant with the freshness of western woods and fields, and instinct with the aspiring and determined life of the race of western men. The poet of a new country is naturally of the party of progress; his noblest theme is man, and his highest law liberty. The key-note of Mr. GALLAGHER'S social speculation is in his poem of "The Laborer." Ohio is without a past and without traditions; populous and rich as are her broad domains, in her villages still walk the actors in her earliest civilized history; and our author never strikes a more popular chord than when he celebrates

"The mothers of our forest land,"

or sings of

"The free and manly lives we led,
Mid verdure or mid snow,

In the days when we were pioneers,
Fifty years ago."

But his best pieces, of which "August" is a spe

Methodist Episcopal Church, for a considerable number of years, and edited with much taste and knowledge, by gentlemen appointed by the Conferences of that denomination.

cimen, are descriptive of external nature. He de- of the pieces he had then written which met lights in painting the phenomena of the changing the approval of his maturer judgment, under the seasons, the sights and sounds of the forest, and simple title of "Poems." Two or three of his the more poetical aspects of rural and humble life, longer productions have since appeared in pamand in all his pictures there is, with a happy free- | phlets; and a few of his best poems are quoted dom of outline and coloring, the utmost fidelity in in Selections from the Poetical Literature of the detail and general effect. West," which appeared in Cincinnati, under his editorial supervision, in 1841; but there has not been published any complete or satisfactory collection of his works.