All men seem to know, or know of him. He has grown to be one of the celebrities of the land. Many fear or dislike him for what he has written, and many love and respect the man for his inherent good qualities and genuine kindness of nature. Knowing him only through his writings, we had formed the impression that all the milk of human kindness in the man, by some mysterious process, had been changed into wormwood and gall, and was oozing out at the end of his fingers in the form of the bitter D. P. letters to the Commercial. But we have learned here some new phases of the man’s character. Many who know him well—and among others George Alfred Townsend—have told us that Piatt was one of the most kind and genial men they had ever known—one of the most unselfish and generous—doing more individual favors to poor devils who had no claims upon him; securing by persevering personal effort more places for wounded and worthy soldiers than any man in Washington; that he is a man of the very largest human sympathy, and that his heart was as easily touched by a tale of real suffering or wrong as a child’s. . . . Piatt is no Bohemian in any sense of the word; is not dependent upon his pen for support; lives at the Arlington, we are informed, very elegantly upon his own means, and is in all senses an independent writer. One thing is certainly to be conceded: that wrongs and frauds, the jobs of Washington, so indescribably corrupt and infamous, receive no mercy at his hands. And for the battles which he has often fought in the interests of the people against politicians, tricksters and jobbers, and against their corrupt schemes, the country owes him a debt of gratitude. (Cincinnati)