Diary of George Mifflin Dallas, January 5, 1861

Frederick William, whom I saw at the wedding of his son and the Princess Royal, after acting as Regent since November, 1858, has mounted the throne, by the death of the old crazy King William IV., under the name of William V. of Prussia. His politics are more liberal than his predecessor's.

Brougham publishes in the Times of to-day his brief correspondence with Redpath, who invites to a consultation how to extinguish slavery in the United States. The poor old trimmer is backing out, and wants to abdicate his chiefdom of Exeter Hall. This is his second or third effort to wriggle himself out of the humiliation consequent upon his fanatical negrophilism at the Statistical Congress.

On Wednesday last the ceremony of again proroguing Parliament took place in the House of Lords. The day appointed for meeting is the 5th of February, but "for despatch of business" was omitted; inadvertently, or by design?

Mr. Motley, the historian, called and spent an hour in chat. I expressed my great delight with his recently issued work, the "Dutch Republic." Told him I had noted two new spellings, Escorial and Burghley; the first he said was unquestionably correct, the second he took from the Lord Treasurer's uniform mode of signing his name, though it was spelled very variously. In the course of conversation he avowed the opinion that Walsingham, not Burghley, was the great Minister of Queen Elizabeth, and he thought that Elizabeth had taken to herself merit and glory which really belonged to the British people generally. We turned over the distressing condition of American politics. He is for saving the Union at almost any sacrifice; but I thought I could perceive that he entertained the theory that, maintaining the name, the flag, and the Constitution, we should be happier and equally great without the cotton States. He is inveterately hostile to slavery. Now that his two volumes are making him famous, he proposes to be presented with his wife and daughter at Court. Of course I shall be proud to gratify his wish in that respect. I think he remembers that the literary fame of Washington Irving made him chargé at this Court and subsequently Minister at Madrid. Lincoln can give me no more acceptable successor. The foundations for such an appointment are more broad, more durable, and in every way more satisfactory than those of mere political partisanship.

SOURCE: George Mifflin Dallas, Diary of George Mifflin Dallas, While United States Minister to Russia 1837 to 1839, and to England 1856 to 1861, Volume 3, p. 425-7

Diary of Captain Luman Harris Tenney: June 25, 1865

Did not go out to church in A. M. Wrote home and to George. Read in “Capt. Bonneville,” by Irving. Several of the boys called. In evening attended service. Mr. Ives preached. Interesting meeting.

SOURCE: Frances Andrews Tenney, War Diary Of Luman Harris Tenney, p. 168

John L. Motley to Anna Lothrop Motley, March 28, 1863

Vienna,

March 28, 1863.

My Dearest Mother: . . . As to your making yourself out so very old, I can't admit that when I see, for example, Lord Palmerston, who is ever so many years older than you, in his eightieth year in fact, shouldering the whole British Empire, and making a joke of it. Our climate, too, so trying to the young, I believe to be exceedingly beneficial to those more advanced in years. Only do go to Nahant next summer; I am sure that the air and sight of that sea-beaten promontory is to you an elixir of youth.

I have little to say of our goings-on here. Lent, which has succeeded a dancing carnival, has been pretty well filled up every evening with soirees. Baron Sina, the minister of the defunct kingdom of Greece, an enormously wealthy man, has given a series of evening parties, in which there was always music by the Italian operatic artists now performing in Vienna. We had Patti last week, who sang delightfully. She has made quite a furore in this place. We have only heard her at the theater once. She is not at the Imperial Opera, where we have a box, but at a smaller one, and the price is altogether too large, as one is obliged to subscribe for the whole engagement. I hope to get a box, however, for next Saturday night, when she is to play Lucia; and this will be sufficient for us. We dined with a large party three days ago at the same Baron Sina's expressly to meet Patti. We had previously dined with her at Baron Rothschild's. She is a dear little unsophisticated thing, very good, and very pretty and innocent. She considers herself as an American, and sang “Home, Sweet Home,” after dinner the other day, because she said she was sure we should like to hear it, and she sang it most delightfully.

Last Wednesday night we gave a great squash of our own. It was our first attempt in the evening-party line, and we were a little nervous about it. You know you don't send out written invitations and receive answers. You merely send a couple of days before a verbal invitation through a servant, without any chance of a reply. At a quarter before ten there were not a dozen people in our rooms, and we began to feel a little fidgety, although we knew the regular habits of the people. But in ten minutes the house was crowded. It was considered a most successful squeeze. All the Liechtensteins, Esterhazys, Trauttmansdorffs, and the other great families of Vienna, together with nearly the whole diplomatic corps, were present, and seemed to amuse themselves as well as at other parties. Talking the same talk with the same people, drinking the same tea and lemonade, and eating the same ices as at other houses, there is no reason why they should not have amused themselves as well. The young ladies are a power in Vienna. At every “rout,” or evening reception, they always have one of the rooms to themselves, which is called the Comtessen Zimmer (no young lady in this society being supposed to be capable of a lower rank than countess), and where they chatter away with their beaus, and sometimes arrange their quadrilles and waltzes for the balls of a year ahead.

Nothing can be more charming than the manners of the Austrian aristocracy, both male and female. It is perfect nature combined with high breeding. A characteristic of it is the absence of that insolence on the one side and of snobbishness on the other which are to be found in nearly all other societies. This arises from the fact that the only passport to the upper society is pedigree, an unquestionable descent on both sides of the house from nobility of many generations. Without this passport a native might as well think of getting into the moon as getting into society. Therefore the society is very small, not more than three hundred or so, all very much intermarried and related; everybody knows everybody, so that pushing is impossible, and fending off unnecessary. The diplomatic corps move among it, of course, officially. They are civil to us, and invite us to their great parties, and come to our houses. As a spectacle of men and women, and how they play their parts, as Washington Irving used to say, I have no objection to spending my evenings thus for a small portion of the year. It does not interfere with my solid work during the daytime. English society is very interesting, because anybody who has done anything noteworthy may be seen in it. But if an Austrian should be Shakspere, Galileo, Nelson, and Raphael all in one, he couldn't be admitted into good society in Vienna unless he had the sixteen quarterings of nobility which birth alone could give him. Naturally it is not likely to excite one's vanity that one goes as a minister where as an individual he would find every door shut against him. But in the way of duty it is important to cultivate social relations where one is placed, and in these times I am desirous that the American legation should be in a line with other missions. Fortunately, evening entertainments only cost the wax candles and the lemonade.

There is not much in this letter, my dear mother, to interest you. But I thought it better to talk of things around me instead of sending my disquisitions about American affairs, in regard to which I am so unfortunate as to differ from those whom you are in the habit of talking with. Best love to my father and all at home.

Ever your most affectionate son,

J. L. M.

SOURCE: George William Curtis, editor, The Correspondence of John Lothrop Motley in Two Volumes, Library Edition, Volume 2, p. 322-5

Diary of William Howard Russell: March 20, 1861

The papers are still full of Sumter and Pickens. The reports that they are or are not to be relieved are stated and contradicted in each paper without any regard to individual consistency. The “Tribune” has an article on my speech at the St. Patrick's dinner, to which it is pleased to assign reasons and motives which the speaker, at all events, never had in making it.

Received several begging letters, some of them apparently with only too much of the stamp of reality about their tales of disappointment, distress, and suffering. In the afternoon went down Broadway, which was crowded, notwithstanding the piles of blackened snow by the curbstones, and the sloughs of mud, and half-frozen pools at the crossings. Visited several large stores or shops — some rival the best establishments in Paris or London in richness and in value, and far exceed them in size and splendor of exterior. Some on Broadway, built of marble, or of fine cut stone, cost from £6,000 to £8,000 a year in mere rent. Here, from the base to the fourth or fifth story, are piled collections of all the world can produce, often in excess of all possible requirements of the country; indeed I was told that the United States have always imported more goods than they could pay for. Jewellers' shops are not numerous, but there are two in Broadway which have splendid collections of jewels, and of workmanship in gold and silver, displayed to the greatest advantage in fine apartments decorated with black marble, statuary, and plate

New York has certainly all the air of a “nouveau riche.” There is about it an utter absence of any appearance of a grandfather — one does not see even such evidences of eccentric taste as are afforded in Paris and London, by the existence of shops where the old families of a country cast off their “exuviӕ” which are sought by the new, that they may persuade the world they are old; there is no curiosity shop, not to speak of a Wardour Street, and such efforts as are made to supply the deficiency reveal an enormous amount of ignorance or of bad taste. The new arts, however, flourish; the plague of photography has spread through all the corners of the city, and the shop-windows glare with flagrant displays of the most tawdry art. In some of the large booksellers' shops — Appleton's for example — are striking proofs of the activity of the American press, if not of the vigor and originality of the American intellect. I passed down long rows of shelves laden with the works of European authors, for the most part, oh shame! stolen and translated into American type without the smallest compunction or scruple, and without the least intention of ever yielding the most pitiful deodand to the authors. Mr. Appleton sells no less than one million and a half of Webster's spelling-books a year; his tables are covered with a flood of pamphlets, some for, others against coercion; some for, others opposed to slavery, — but when I asked for a single solid, substantial work on the present difficulty, I was told there was not one published worth a cent. With such men as Audubon and Wilson in natural history, Prescott and Motley in history, Washington Irving and Cooper in fiction, Longfellow and Edgar Poe in poetry, even Bryant and the respectabilities in rhyme, and Emerson as essayist, there is no reason why New York should be a paltry imitation of Leipsig, without the good faith of Tauchnitz.

I dined with a litterateur well known in England to many people a year or two ago — sprightly, loquacious, and well informed, if neither witty nor profound — now a Southern man with Southern proclivities, — as Americans say; once a Southern man with such strong anti-slavery convictions, that his expression of them in an English quarterly had secured him the hostility of his own people — one of the emanations of American literary life for which their own country finds no fitting receiver. As the best proof of his sincerity, he has just now abandoned his connection with one of the New York papers on the republican side, because he believed that the course of the journal was dictated by anti-Southern fanaticism. He is, in fact, persuaded that there will be a civil war, and that the South will have much of the right on its side in the contest. At his rooms were Mons. B–––, Dr. Gwin, a Californian ex-senator, Mr. Barlow, and several of the leading men of a certain clique in New York. The Americans complain, or assert, that we do not understand them, and I confess the reproach, or statement, was felt to be well founded by myself at all events, when I heard it declared and admitted that “if Mons. Belmont had not gone to the Charleston Convention, the present crisis would never have occurred.”

SOURCE: William Howard Russell, My Diary North and South, p. 24-6

Washington Irving On John Bull

In looking over Irving’s happy but truthful description of John Bull, in his “Sketch Book,” we find the following, which is so apropos to the present time that we copy it:

                                                                                     

“He (John Bull) cannot hear of a quarrel between the most distant of his neighbors, but he begins incontinently to fumble with the head of his cudgel and consider wither his interest or his honor does not require that he should meddle in the broil.”

– Published in The Davenport Daily Gazette, Davenport, Iowa, Monday Morning, March 3, 1862, p. 2