“Colonel Christian will deliver you this letter, together with the first two volumes of the ‘Forest of Montabano,’ I do not trouble him with the last two volumes, for fear of incommoding him, and because I shall be at your father’s on Wednesday evening, if the business before the Legislature be not very important. You will feel much sympathy for the unfortunate Angelina, and admiration for the character of good Father Patrick. Frederick is inexplicable until the last volume is read.
“Again suffer me to assure you of my constant esteem and affection, and believe me to be yours most faithfully,
“John Tyler.
“To Miss Letitia Christian,
“New Kent.”
Mrs. Letitia Semple, the only surviving daughter of Mrs. Letitia Tyler, says, regarding this letter, “I enclose you a copy of the first letter my father ever wrote to my mother; and I had a book of original sonnets written by him in his youthful days, many of which were addressed to her; for he was full of music and full of poetry and possessed an exquisite literary taste; but this book has been lost to us, in one of my writing desks stolen during the war.
“My father and my mother were born in the same year—that of 1790, he being from the 29th March to the 12th November older than she was. They were married on father’s twenty-third birthday following that of his birth, after a courtship and engagement of nearly five years. He met her for the first time at a private party in the neighborhood, while on a visit to ‘Greenway,’ the home residence of grandfather Tyler, in Charles City county, adjoining that of New Kent, where grandfather Christian resided at ‘Cedar Grove.’ He had already taken his collegiate degrees at William and Mary College when scarcely more than seventeen years old, and was at the time a law student in Richmond, under the special office counsel and instruction of the celebrated Edmund Randolph, justly esteemed as the father of the Constitution of the United States, as Mr. Jefferson was of the Declaration of American Independence, and who had been the Attorney-General of President Washington, and the Secretary of State of President Jefferson, my grandfather Tyler being Governor of Virginia, and then residing in Richmond. After their troth was plighted, he had been twice or thrice elected to the State Legislature before their marriage was solemnized; and his last visit to her at ‘Cedar Grove’ was only three weeks before the wedding, yet I have heard him repeatedly say that, ‘then, for the first time, he ventured to kiss her hand on parting, so perfectly reserved and modest had she always been.’
“My mother’s mother was Mary Brown, of the same family with that of the late Judge John Brown, of Williamsburg, and Professor Dabney Brown, of William and Mary College, the former of whom finally moved to Kentucky, and the latter more recently to California; and with that of the Hon. James Halyburton, late Judge of the United States District Court of Virginia, and of the Hon. John M. Gregory, late Judge of the Henrico Circuit and Governor of Virginia; and as to the late Judge Christian, and the present Judge Christian, of the Peninsular Circuit and of the General Court of Virginia, the first was her son, and the last her cousin, as are also the present Doctors William and Edward Warren, formerly of Edenton, North Carolina, whither they moved from New Kent in Virginia, but now of Baltimore.”
Not long after her marriage, Mrs. Tyler had the misfortune to lose both of her parents, and now having two less to love in this world, she freely gave the share which had been theirs, to her husband and her children, and to her sisters and her brothers. In truth, at no period of her life does it seem that she existed for herself, but only for those near and dear to her.
She was noted for the beauty of her person and of her features, for the ease and grace of her carriage, for a delicate refinement of taste in dress that excluded with precision every color and ornament not strictly becoming and harmonizing in the general effect. Possessing an acute nervous organization and sensitive temperament, combined with an unusually correct judgment, any observant stranger of polished education would have been almost unconsciously attracted to her among thousands by her air of quiet courtesy and benignity. With these engaging qualities, and the social advantages attaching to her position, she could easily have impressed her power upon what is termed society had she so desired, still she never aspired to wield the sceptre of fashion, and never sought to attract attention beyond the limits of her own family, and the circle of her immediate friends and relatives.