Background
Albert Mathews was the son of Oliver and Mary (Field) Mathews. He was born on September 8, 1820 of a well-to-do family in New York City.
Albert Mathews was the son of Oliver and Mary (Field) Mathews. He was born on September 8, 1820 of a well-to-do family in New York City.
He received his early education in New York. Entering Yale College he graduated in 1842 and devoted the next three years to the study of law, first at the Harvard Law School and later in New York. In 1845 he was admitted to the bar and immediately went into partnership with Augustus L. Brown.
The new firm of Brown & Mathews became attorneys for the sheriff, and Mathews found himself launched almost at once into a lucrative practice. All through his early years as a practising lawyer, he had contributed essays and articles to the periodical press, but not until a few months before his second marriage, and perhaps in connection with his courtship, did he begin to take authorship very seriously. In 1860 he published his first book, Walter Ashwood, A Love Story. This novel is altogether a very wooden performance having a faintly Byronesque hero and the approved sentimental flavor of the day. As his nom de plume he continued to use Paul Siogvolk, the same name under which his earlier essays and legends had been written and which he used for all subsequent writing of a non-legal character. In the main their tone is rather grave than gay, and their appeal was limited to the thoughtful and reflective few. In 1879 he brought out a collection of essays under the title A Bundle of Papers. Other writings of a mixed character followed in rapid succession: Thoughts on Codification of the Common Law (1881); Memorial of Bernard Roelker (1889); Ruminations (1893); A Few Verses (1896). By 1897 both his partners A. L. Brown and G. W. Blunt were dead, and he, himself, had virtually retired. In the proceedings of the bar associations of the city and of the state he was active to the end of his life and to the city association he left a generous legacy when he died. His death occurred at Lake Mohonk, N. Y.
To his friends he was known as an amiable and genial character, and among them he acquired a degree of celebrity by the enticing way in which he was able to word legal forms of a content intrinsically grim. Though nicknamed after the Prince Consort because of his stately bearing, he could unbend when occasion demanded and beam very winningly through his antique gold spectacles upon judges and juries who failed to respond to impersonal logic. In a purely professional way, he was distinctively a court lawyer and dealt for the greater part in the trial of causes and the arguing of appeals. As he specialized closely in no single branch of the law, he has left no work of a permanently valuable character.
He was married twice, first on December 12, 1849, to Louise Mott Strong, who lived only a few years, and, on March 20, 1861, to Mrs. Cettie (Moore) Gwynne, who died in 1884.