Even while I write word comes: The lady of the manor is dead. The quaint hood, the stately grace, the winning smile we shall see no more. All have gone into the darkness of death. And who was the lady of the manor, who for three winters in Washington has been the observed and admired of all who met her in the circles of society? She was Cora Livingston Barton, the reigning belle of Jackson’s administration. She was the daughter of Edward Livingston, who served his country as Member of Congress and Senator from Louisiana, as Secretary of State during Jackson’s administration, and as United States Minister to France. Her father was as distinguished for goodness as he was for noble intellect and exalted public service, and her mother was one of the most remarkable women who ever graced the National Capital. She was a social queen of the rarest endowments. She was the chosen friend and dear counsellor of two persons as opposite in nature and temperament as General Jackson and Mrs. John Quincy Adams. She was a very queen of entertainers, as the wife of the Secretary of State, entertaining foreigners and Americans and political foes, with an ease, elegance and fascination of manner, which annihilated alike all prejudice and animosity. She was a classical scholar, familiar with the best ancient and modern thoughts. The chosen counsellor of her husband in the gravest affairs of State,—a self-abnegating mother,—a devout Methodist, she having chosen that communion as her own on account of the simplicity and fervor of its mode of worship.
Of this rare woman, our “lady of the manor” was the only child. “Upon her she lavished extraordinary maternal devotion, hardly ever suffering her to be out of her sight. Her daughter had hardly reached girlhood when her beautiful mother assumed the simplest matronly attire. Ever afterwards she seemed rather displeased than flattered when allusions were made to her own still remarkable appearance.”
Cora Livingston was worthy to be the child of such a mother. She was the most famous belle of the Jackson administration. She married Thomas Barton, who went as Secretary of Legation with her father, the Minister to France, and who remained as Chargé d’Affaires when Edward Livingston returned.
In the course of time, mother and daughter, both widows, spent their winters in New York and their summers at Montgomery Place, that grand old manor on the Hudson, of which we catch glimpses through its immemorial trees, as we sail by on the river. Here, beautiful and saintly, that mother died, October, 1860, at the age of seventy-eight.
Warned by physicians to seek a softer climate, after the lapse of generations, in the winter of 1871 the daughter returned to Washington, the scene of her childish home and early triumphs. She did not belong to things gone by. With her two stately and beautiful nieces she became at once the centre of a rare group of friends, of the attention and reverence of the first men in the State, and an object of admiring comment wherever she appeared. She appeared at many morning receptions. I see her now as I saw her the first time stepping from her carriage into the great portico of the White House, across its corridor to the Blue Room, with the light, springing step of a girl; and yet, the soft clinging black dress, the quaint hood of black silk, with its inside snowy ruche, all told that she made not the slightest pretence to youth. And now, in these summer days, comes the word: “While packing some books in a trunk to go to Montgomery Place, she bent down, burst a blood vessel in the head, and without warning died.”
They have all been morning receptions to which I have asked you,—the “morning” ending at 5 P. M. I cannot invite you to go to the “German,” which begins at 11 P. M. and ends at daybreak. I have too deep a care for your physical and spiritual health to ask you to do any such thing. When you read of the gay doings and bright assemblies here, perhaps you think it hard sometimes that you must stay away in a quiet place to work or study. You feel almost defrauded because you are shut out from the splendor and mirth and flattery of fashion. You long for the pomp and glory of the world, and sigh that so little of either falls on your life-path. Thus I shall seem cruel to you when I say that you had better be shut up for the next five years, even in a convent, silently growing toward a noble life in the world afterward, than to be caught and carried on by its follies now, before you have learned how to live.
Are you young? Then you should be more beautiful at twenty-five, at thirty, at thirty-five, than you are now. Not with the budding bloom of first youth, that is as evanescent as it is exquisite. What a pity that it is beauty’s only dower to so many American women. They waste it, lose it, then wilt and wither. I want you so to feed the sources of life to-day that you may grow, not wither; that you may bloom, not fade, into the perfect flower of womanhood.
Terpsichore is a sad sight to me; not because Terpsichore dances, for dancing in itself may be as innocent as a bird’s flying; not because she loves beautiful attire, for exquisite dress is a feminine fine art, as meet for a woman as the flower’s tint, or the bird’s plumage. I sigh at the sight of my pretty Terpsichore, because the first bloom of her exquisite youth is being exhaled and lost forever in a feverish, false atmosphere of being. Something of delicate sensibility, something of unconscious innocence, something of freshness of feeling, of purity of soul is wasted with the fresh young bloom of her cheeks in the midnight revel, lengthened into morning; wasted in the heated dance, in the indigestible feast, in the wild, unhealthy excitement through which she whirls night alter night. Terpsichore, in her tattered tarletan dress, creeping to bed in the gray morning, after having danced all night, is a sad sight to see to any one who can see her as she is. Terpsichore’s mother would be a sadder sight still, if she were not a vexatious one. She brought back from Europe the notion, which so many of our countrywomen think it fine to bring, that “full dress” is necessarily next to no dress. She tells you, in a supreme tone, that admits no denial, that you would not be admitted into the drawing-room of a court in Europe unless in full dress, viz., semi-nakedness. She would be nothing, if not European in style. Thus, night after night, this mother of grown-up daughters and sons appears in crowded assemblies in attire that would befit in outline a child of eight years of age. If we venture to meet her ipse dixit on European style, with the assurance of the Princess Helena, Ghika, Dora D’Istria, one of the most learned and beautiful women of this world, that the conventional society dress of Europe is more immodest than any she saw while traveling over the mountains and valleys of the East, she will tell you that Princess Ghika “is not an authority on dress in Paris,” which is doubtless true.
Thus, in republican Washington, in glaring drawing-rooms, we are treated to a study of female anatomy, which is appalling. Don’t jump to the conclusion that I want every lady to go to a party in a stuff dress, drawn up to her ears; nor that I am so prudish as to think no dress can be modestly, as well as immodestly low. No matter how it be cut, the way in which a dress is worn is more impressive than the dress itself. I have seen a young girl’s shoulders rise from her muslin frock as unconsciously and as innocently as the lilies in the garden; and I have come upon a wife and mother, in a public assembly, so dressed for promiscuous gaze that I have involuntarily shut my eyes with shame.
I never saw Lydia Thompson; but from what I have heard of her, have come to the conclusion that her attire is just as modest as that of many ladies whom I meet at fashionable parties. They cast up their eyes in horror at the name of poor Lydia Thompson. They go to see Lydia Thompson! No, indeed! How could their eyes endure the sight of that dreadful woman? No less they themselves offer gratis, to a promiscuous company, every evening, a sight, morally, quite as dreadful. The men, who pay their money to Lydia Thompson and her troupe, know that their dress and their burlesque, however questionable, make at once their business and their livelihood. They cannot make the same excuse for their wives, their sisters, and their sweethearts, if they see them scarcely less modestly attired in some fashionable ball-room. Remember this; if you ever find yourself in such a place, the best men in that room, at heart, are not delighted with such displays. Being men, they will look at whatever is presented to their gaze; more, many will compliment and flatter the very woman, whose vanity at heart they pity or despise; but it will always be with the mental reservation: “My wife should never dress like that!” “I don’t want to see my sister dancing round dances for hours in the arms of a man whom even I cannot think of without horror; and if —— dances with him again, I’ll not go to another ‘German;’” said a young man to his mother, this very winter.