Recent Deaths.

The celebrated Mrs. Sherwood, the most popular and universally known female writer of the last generation, died on the 22d of September, at Twickenham, in England. She was a daughter of Dr. George Butt, chaplain to George III., vicar of Kidderminster, and rector of Stanford, in the county of Worcester. Dr. Butt was the representative of the family of Sir William De Butts, well known as physician to Henry VIII., and mentioned as such by Shakspeare. Mary Martha Butt, afterwards Mrs. Sherwood, was born at Stanford, Worcestershire, on the 6th of May, 1775. In 1803 she married her cousin, Henry Sherwood, of the 53d regiment of foot. In 1805 she accompanied her husband to India, where, in consequence of her zealous labors in the cause of religion amongst the soldiers and natives dwelling around her, Henry Martyn and the Right Rev. Daniel Corrie, D.D., late Bishop of Madras, became acquainted with her, and the intimacy which then commenced also remained unbroken until death. Her principal works were that favorite tale of Little Henry and his Bearer, The Lady of the Manor, The Church Catechism, The Nun, Henry Milner, The Fairchild Family, and more recently, The Golden Garland of Inestimable Delights. In some of her later compositions, she evinced a tendency to the doctrine of the Universalists, which lessened her popularity. The great number of her books prevents an enumeration of even the most popular of them. Mrs. Sherwood's husband, Captain Sherwood, expired, after a most trying illness, at Twickenham, on the 6th of December, 1849; the fatigue she went through, in devoted attention to him, and the bereavement she experienced at the severance by fate of a union of nearly half a century, were the ultimate causes of her own demise. Though she was of advanced age, her mental faculties never failed her, and she preserved a religious cheerfulness of mind to the last. She expired, surrounded by her family, leaving one son, the Rev. Henry Martyn Sherwood, Rector of Broughton-Hacket, and Vicar of White Ladies Aston, Worcestershire, and two daughters. The elder daughter is the wife of a clergyman, and mother of a numerous family. The younger has always resided with her parent; she has of late years ably assisted in her mother's writings, and bids fair to sustain well her reputation. She has been, we are informed, intrusted, by her mother's especial desire, with the papers containing the records of Mrs. Sherwood's life, which is intended soon for publication. The editions of Mrs. Sherwood's writings have been numerous. The best is that of the Harpers, in ten or twelve volumes.

Rev. James H. Hotchkiss, died at Prattsburgh, Steuben county, New-York, on September 2d, aged seventy years. He was the author of a History of the Churches in Western New-York, published in a large octavo volume, about two years ago, and had just preached his half-century sermon. He was the son of Rev. Beriah Hotchkiss, the pioneer missionary of large sections of the State of New-York. The son graduated at Williams College, 1800; studied theology with Dr. Porter, of Catskill, was ordained by an Association, installed at East Bloomfield in 1802, removed to Prattsburgh in 1809, and there labored twenty-one years. The Genesee Evangelist gives the following sketch of his character:

"He had a mind of a strong, masculine order, well disciplined by various reading, and remarkably stored with general knowledge. The doctrinal views of the good old orthodox New England stamp, which he imbibed at first, he maintained strenuously to the last; and left a distinct impression of them wherever he had an opportunity to inculcate them. His labors, through the half-century, were 'abundant,' and indefatigable; and to him, more than to any other one man probably, is the Genesee country indebted for its present literary, moral and religious character. Under his ministry there were many religious revivals, and some signal ones, especially in Prattsburgh. The years 1819 and 1825 were eminently signalized in this way. He had the happiness of closing his life in the scenes of his greatest usefulness."

Brigadier-General Henry Whiting, of the Quartermaster's Department, died at St Louis, Mo., on the 16th of September. He arrived at St Louis, as we learn from the Republican of the 17th, on Sunday, the 14th, from a tour of official duty in Texas, being in his usual health. On Tuesday afternoon, while in his room at the Planter's House, he was, without any premonition whatever, stricken dead instantaneously. The cause of his death, in all probability, was an affection of the heart. His remains were taken to Jefferson Barracks on the 17th, for interment.

Gen. Whiting, who was among the oldest officers of the army, was a native of Lancaster, in Massachusetts, a son of Gen. John Whiting, also a native of that place. He was not only an accomplished officer in the department in which he has spent a large portion of his life, but he made extensive scientific and literary attainments, and was a gentleman of great private worth. In hours stolen from official duties, he was for many years a large contributor to the literature of the country. His articles which from time to time appeared in the North-American Review, were of an eminently practical and useful character, and highly creditable to his scholarship and sound judgment. The biographical sketch of the late President Taylor, in a recent number, confined chiefly to his military life, and embracing a graphic description of the extraordinary successes in Mexico, was from Gen. Whiting's pen. He published a few years ago an important collection of the General Orders of Washington. He was deserving of praise also as a poet and as a dramatic author.

Commodore Lewis Warrington, of the United States navy, died in Washington, on the 12th October, after a painful illness. He was a native of Virginia, and was born in November, 1782. From a sketch of his life in the Herald, it appears that he entered the navy on the 6th of January, 1800, and soon after joined the frigate Chesapeake, then lying at Norfolk. In this ship he remained on the West India station until May, 1801, when he returned to the United States and joined the frigate President, under Commodore Dale, and soon blockaded Tripoli until 1802, when he again returned to the United States, and joined the frigate New-York, which sailed, and remained on the Mediterranean station until 1803. On his return from the Mediterranean he was ordered to the Vixen, and again joined the squadron which had lately left, where he remained during the attack on the gun-boats and batteries of Tripoli, in which the Vixen always took part. In November, 1804, he was made acting lieutenant; and in July, 1805, he joined the brig Siren, a junior lieutenant. In March, 1806, he joined the Enterprise, as first lieutenant, and did not return to the United States until July, 1807—an absence of four years. After his return in 1807 he was ordered to the command of a gun-boat on the Norfolk station, then under the command of Commodore Decatur. This was a position calculated to damp the ardor of the young officer, as it was so far below several he had filled. He, however, maintained his usual bearing for two years, when he was again ordered to the Siren as first lieutenant. On the return of this vessel from Europe, whither she went with dispatches, Lieut. Warrington was ordered to the Essex, as her first lieutenant, in September of the same year. In the Essex he cruised on the American coast, and again carried out dispatches for the government, returning in 1812. He was then ordered to the frigate Congress as her first lieutenant, and sailed, on the declaration of war, with the squadron under Commodore Rodgers, to intercept the British West India fleet, which was only avoided by the latter in consequence of a heavy fog, which continued for fourteen days. He remained in the Congress until 1813, when he became first lieutenant of the frigate United States, in which he remained until his promotion to the rank of master commandant, soon after which he took command of the sloop-of-war Peacock. While cruising in the Peacock, in latitude 27 deg. 40 min., he encountered the British brig-of-war Epervier. His own letter to the Secretary of the Navy, descriptive of that encounter, is as follows:

At Sea, April 29, 1814.

Sir:—I have the honor to inform you that we have this morning captured, after an action of forty-two minutes, his Britannic Majesty's brig Epervier, rating and mounting eighteen thirty-two pound cannonades, with one hundred and twenty-eight men, of whom eleven were killed and fifteen wounded, according to the best information we could obtain. Among the latter is her first lieutenant, who has lost an arm, and received a severe splinter wound in the hip. Not a man in the Peacock was killed, and only two wounded, neither dangerously. The fate of the Epervier would have been decided in much less time, but for the circumstance of our foreyard having been totally disabled by two round-shot in the starboard quarter, from her first broadside, which entirely deprived us of the use of our fore-topsails, and compelled us to keep the ship large throughout the remainder of the action. This, with a few topmast and topgallant backstays cut away, and a few shot through our sails, is the only injury the Peacock has sustained. Not a round-shot touched our hull, and our masts and spars are as sound as ever. When the enemy struck he had five feet of water in his hold; his maintopmast was over the side; his mainboom shot away; his foremast cut nearly away, and tottering; his forerigging and stays shot away; his bowsprit badly wounded, and forty-five shot-holes in his hull, twenty of which were within a foot of his water-line, above and below. By great exertions we got her in sailing order just as night came on. In fifteen minutes after the enemy struck, the Peacock was ready for another action, in every respect, except the foreyard, which was sent down, fished, and we had the foresail set again in forty-five minutes—such was the spirit and activity of our gallant crew. The Epervier had under convoy an English hermaphrodite brig, a Russian, and a Spanish ship, which all hauled their wind, and stood to the E. N. E. I had determined upon pursuing the former, but found that it would not be prudent to leave our prize in her then crippled state, and the more particularly so as we found she had on board one hundred and twenty thousand dollars in specie. Every officer, seaman, and marine did his duty, which is the highest compliment I can pay them.

I am, &c., L. WARRINGTON.

Capt. Warrington brought his prize safely home, and was received with great honor, because of his success in the encounter. In the early part of the year 1815, he sailed in the squadron under Commodore Decatur, for a cruise in the Indian Ocean. The Peacock and Hornet were obliged to separate in chasing, and did not again meet until they arrived at Tristan d'Acunha, the place appointed for rendezvous. After leaving that place, the Peacock met with a British line-of-battle ship, from which she escaped, and gained the Straits of Sunda, where she captured four vessels, one of which was a brig of fourteen guns, belonging to the East India Company's service. From this vessel Captain Warrington first heard of the ratification of peace. He then returned to the United States. While in command of the Peacock, Capt. Warrington captured nineteen vessels, three of which were given up to prisoners, and sixteen destroyed.

Since the close of the war, Commodore Warrington has filled many responsible stations in the service for a long time, having been on shore-duty for twenty-eight years. He was appointed one of the Board of Naval Commissioners, and subsequently held the post of chief of the Bureau of Ordnance in the Navy Department, which post he held at the time of his death. His whole career of service extended through a period of more than fifty-one years, during all of which time he was respected, and held as one of the most prominent officers of the United States navy. At the time of his death there was but one older officer in service.

John Kidd, M.D., of the University of Oxford, died suddenly early in September. He was formerly Professor of Chemistry, and since 1822 Regius Professor of Medicine. Dr. Kidd did good service in his time, as his publications testify, in various departments of mineralogical, chemical, and geological research, and about ten years ago he put forth some observations on medical reform. Dr. Kidd was one of the eminent men selected under the Earl of Bridgewater's will to write one of the well-known "Bridgewater Treatises." The subject was, On the Adaptation of External Nature to the Physical Condition of Man. Together with the Regius Professorship of Medicine, to which the mastership of Ewelme Hospital, in the county of Oxford, is attached, Dr. Kidd held the office of librarian to the Radcliffe Library.

The Earl of Donoughmore died on the 12th of September, at Palmerstown House, county of Dublin, in the sixty-fourth year of his age. He was lord-lieutenant of the county of Tipperary, and had a seat in the House of Lords as a British peer with the title of Viscount Hutchinson, of Knocklofty, but will be better remembered in history as the gallant Colonel Hutchinson, who was one of the parties implicated in the celebrated escape of Lavalette, in the year 1815, shortly after the restoration of the Bourbons. He is succeeded in his extensive estates in the south of Ireland by Viscount Suirdale, his lordship's son by his first wife, the daughter of the Lord Mountjoy, who lost his life in the royal service during the Irish rebellion of 1798.

William Nicol, F.R.S.E., died in Edinburgh on the 2nd of September, in his eighty-third year. Mr. Nicol commenced his career as assistant to the late Dr. Moyes, the eminent blind lecturer on natural philosophy. Dr. Moyes, at his death, bequeathed his apparatus to Mr. Nicol, who then lectured on the same subject. His contributions to the Edinburgh Philosophical Journal were various and valuable; the more important being his description of his successful repetition of Döbereiner's celebrated experiment of igniting spongy platina by a stream of cold hydrogen gas; and his method of preparing fossil woods for microscopic investigation, which led to his discovery of the structural difference between the arucarian and coniferous woods, by far the most important in fossil botany. But the most valuable contribution to physical science, with which his name will ever be associated, was his invention of the single image prism of calcareous spar, known to the scientific world as Nicol's prism.

The Rev. G. G. Freeman, the well-known English missionary, died on the 8th of September at the baths of Homburg, in Germany, of an attack of rheumatic fever. Mr. Freeman had only a little while before returned home from a visit to the mission stations in South Africa, and his latest important labor was the writing of a volume, in which the social, spiritual, and political condition of South Africa was depicted. Mr. Freeman was fifty-seven years of age. He was born in London, educated at Hoxton Academy, and after many years of successful devotion to his profession in England, he proceeded in 1827 to Madagascar, under the direction of the London Missionary Society, and for nine years labored there with eminent energy and success. The share he had in translating the Scriptures, in preparing school-books, and in superintending the mission schools, cannot be recited in this brief sketch, but was such as greatly facilitated the progress of the Christian religion, till, in 1835, the queen proscribed Christianity, and virtually expelled the missionaries from the island. Mr. Freeman then went to the Cape of Good Hope, where he became much interested in South African missions, but the ill health of his wife compelled his return to England, where he arrived about the end of 1836. New duties and labors now awaited him; he had to confer with the directors, and to visit the constituents of the London Missionary Society in all parts of the kingdom. The want of an Institution for the education of the daughters of missionaries having been strongly felt, he took a leading part in the establishment of a school for that purpose in the village of Walthamstow, where he had become connected with the congregational church. In 1841, the loss of health having obliged the Rev. William Ellis to relinquish his official connection with the London Missionary Society, he was appointed foreign secretary, and appeared at the annual meeting of that year in that capacity, and shared with Dr. Tidman the labor of reading the report. How faithfully he fulfilled the duties of that office at home, and at what risk of health and life he sought, in a late voyage to the Mauritius, and journey throughout Southern Africa, to inform himself and the Society of the true state of affairs, both in Madagascar and Caffraria, his publications will show.

James Richardson, the enterprising African traveller, died on the 4th of March last, at a small village called Ungurutua, six days distant from Kouka, the capital of Bornou. Early in January, he and the companions of his mission, Drs. Barth and Overweg, arrived at the immense plain of Damergou, when, after remaining a few days, they separated, Dr. Barth proceeding to Kanu, Dr. Overweg to Guber, and Mr. Richardson taking the direct route to Kouka, by Zinde. There it would seem his strength began to give way, and before he had arrived twelve days' distance from Kouka, he became seriously ill, suffering much from the oppressive heat of the sun. Having reached a large town called Kangarras, he halted three days, and feeling himself refreshed he renewed his journey. After two days, during which his weakness greatly increased, he arrived at the Waddy Mallaha. Leaving this place on the 3d of March, he reached in two hours the village of Ungurutua, when he became so weak that he was unable to proceed. In the evening he took a little food and tried to sleep—but became very restless, and left his tent supported by his servant. He then took some tea and threw himself again on his bed, but did not sleep. His attendants having made some coffee, he asked for a cup, but had no strength to hold it. He repeated several times, "I have no strength;" and after having pronounced the name of his wife, sighed deeply, and expired without a struggle about two hours after midnight. Early in the morning, the body wrapped in linen, and covered with a carpet, was borne to a grave four feet deep, under the shade of a large tree, close to the village, followed by all the principal Sheichs and people of the district.

Those who have read—and very few persons of middle age in this country have not read—the interesting and somewhat apocryphal narrative of Captain Riley's shipwreck on the coast of Africa and long experience of suffering as a slave among the Arabs, will remember the amiable British Consul of Mogadore, in Barbary, Mr. William Willshire. While Capt. Riley, Mr. Robbins, and others of the crew of the "Commerce" (which was the name of the American ship that was wrecked), were in the midst of the great desert, in utter helplessness, Mr. Willshire heard of some of them, and came to their relief with money and provisions, and paid, himself, the price of their ransom, redeeming them from an otherwise perpetual captivity. He took the afflicted and worn-out Americans to his own house at Mogadore, made them, after long suffering and privation, enjoy the luxuries of a bed and the comforts of a home, his wife and daughters uniting with him to alleviate their sufferings, and he afterwards supplied them with the necessary money and provided them the means of a return to their own country. Riley, in the latter part of his life, settled in Ohio, where the name of Willshire has been given to the town in which he lived, and we believe our government made some demonstration of the general feeling of gratefulness with which the American people regarded Mr. Willshire's noble conduct in this case. Mr. Willshire was a model for consuls, and was kept constantly in service by his government. Several years ago he was appointed to Adrianople, where he died suddenly, at an advanced age, on the 4th of August.

The Paris papers announce the death at the age of seventy-six, of M. J. R. Dubois,—director successively of the Gaîté, the Porte-Saint-Martin, and the Opéra, under the Restoration,—and author of a great variety of pieces played in the different theatres of Paris thirty or forty years ago.

Gustav Carlin, the author of several historical essays, and a novel founded on Mexican legends, died in Berlin on the 15th of September, aged sixty-nine. He resided several years in New-York, we believe as a political correspondent of some German newspaper.