“Oh, no!” I demurred. “Toasts are obsolete!”
“Very well, then,” Lord Napier declared. “If you won’t, I will. Here’s to your President, Mr. Cleveland! But,” he continued with a suddenly added depth, “Were it your Chevalier Bayard, I would drink it on my knee!”
Upon my return to America I had the pleasure of shouting to Mr. Bayard, then Secretary of State, a recital of this great tribute. He had now grown very deaf, but my words reached him at last, and he smiled in a most happy way as he asked, almost shyly, but with a warm glance in the eye, despite his effort to remain composed, “Did Napier really say that?”
A feeling of universal regret spread over the capital when it became known that the Napiers were to return to England; and the admiration of the citizens for the popular diplomat expressed itself in the getting-up of a farewell ball, which, in point of size, was one of the most prodigious entertainments ever given in Washington. One group of that great assemblage is vividly before me. In it the young James Gordon Bennett, whom I had seen in earlier days at a fashionable water-cure (and whose general naughtiness as a little boy defies description by my feeble pen), danced vis-à-vis, a handsome, courtly youth, with his mother and Daniel E. Sickles.
During the Pierce administration the old-fashioned quadrilles and cotillions, with an occasional waltz number, were danced to the exclusion of all other Terpsichorean forms; but in the term of his successor, the German was introduced, when Miss Josephine Ward, of New York, afterward Mrs. John R. Thomson, of New Jersey, became prominent as a leader.
When I review those brilliant scenes in which passed and smiled, and danced and chatted, the vast multitude of those who called me “friend,” the army of those now numbered with the dead—I am lost in wonder! My memory seems a Herculaneum, in which, let but a spade of thought be sunk, and some long-hidden treasure is unearthed. I have referred to the citizens of Washington. The term unrolls a scroll in which are listed men and women renowned in those days as hostesses and entertainers. They were a rich and exclusive, and, at the same time, a numerous class, that gave body to the social life of the Federal City. Conspicuous among these were Mrs. A. S. Parker and Mrs. Ogle Tayloe. The home of the former was especially the rendezvous of the young. In the late fifties and sixties it was a palatial residence, famous for its fine conservatories, its spacious parlours, and glistening dancing floors. To-day, so greatly has the city changed, that what is left of that once luxurious home has been converted into small tenements which are rented out for a trifle to the very poor. At the marriage of Mrs. Parker’s daughter, Mary E., in 1860, to Congressman J. E. Bouligny, of Louisiana, crowds thronged in these now forgotten parlours. The President himself was present to give the pretty bride away, and half of Congress came to wish Godspeed to their fellow-member.
The home of Mr. and Mrs. Ogle Tayloe was a museum of things rare and beautiful, vying in this respect with the Corcoran Mansion and the homes of the several members of the Riggs family. One of its treasured mementos was a cane that had been used by Napoleon Bonaparte. Mrs. Tayloe belonged to a New York family; the Tayloes to Virginia. She was a woman of fine taste and broad views, a very gracious hostess, who shrank from the coarse or vulgar wherever she detected it. When Washington became metamorphosed by the strangers who poured into its precincts following the inauguration of Mr. Lincoln in 1861, the Tayloe Mansion was shrouded, its pictures were covered, and its chandeliers wound with protective wrappings. Entertaining there ceased for years. “Nor have I,” said Mrs. Tayloe to me in 1866, “crossed the threshold of the White House since Harriet Lane went out.”
At the Tayloe home I often exchanged a smile and a greeting with Lilly Price, my hostess’s niece, who, when she reached womanhood, was distinguished first as Mrs. Hamersley, and afterward as Lillian, Duchess of Marlborough. At that time she was a fairy-like little slip of a schoolgirl, who, in the intervals between Fridays and Mondays, was permitted to have a peep at the gay gatherings in her aunt’s home. Many years afterward, being a passenger on an outgoing steamer, I learned that Mrs. Hamersley, too, was on board; but before I could make my presence known to her, as had been my intention, she had discovered me and came seeking her “old friend, Mrs. Clay,” and I found that there lingered in the manner of the brilliant society leader, Mrs. Hamersley, much of the same bright charm that had distinguished the little Lilly Price as she smiled down at me from her coign of vantage at the top of the stairway of the Tayloe residence.
But the prince of entertainers, whether citizen or official, who was also a prince among men, the father of unnumbered benefactions and patron of the arts, was dear Mr. Corcoran. When my thoughts turn back to him they invariably resolve themselves into
“And, lo! Ben Adhem’s name led all the rest”