After a brief but brilliant career in England he went over to America, where he settled. The young man who, by an act of singular daring and atrocity, has left behind him so unenviable a notoriety, was the third son of J unius Brutus Booth; he was born in Maryland, near to the city of Baltimore, in the year 1838. At the time of his birth his father was in the occupa tion of a farm; he named his third son after John Wilkes, the great English politician who lived in the reign of George the Third, and from whom the saying Wilkes and liberty originated.