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54 you would have trembled for your country, to have seen, heard and observed the men who are its rulers. There where very few whose behavior bore many marks of wisdom." M. Brissot describes the public characters of that interesting period in few words. He speaks of Secretary Jay as forty-three years of age, and says it would be difficult to find in history a character altogether more respectable. James Madison he calls thirty-seven, appearing hardly thirty-three, "who has an air of fatigue, and his looks announce the censor." He was still a bachelor, and invited distinguished foreigners occasionally to dine with him at his hotel. Hamilton had taken up his abode in Wall Street, and is mentioned in the same breath as six years younger than Madison, but judged to be five years older, who had the finest genius and one of the bravest tempers ever displayed in politics; and a charming wife, who joined to the graces all the candor and simplicity of the American woman. At Hamilton's dinner-table M. Brissot met Rufus King, "nearly thirty-three years old, who passed for the most eloquent man in the United States, but such was his modesty that he appeared ignorant of his own worth." Colonel Duer, Secretary to the Treasury Board, was also at the Hamilton dinner, who, we are told, by our foreign informant, "united to great abilities much goodness of heart;" and General Mifflin, who "added to the vivacity of a Frenchman every obliging characteristic."

It is pleasant to have these worthies thus brought back to the flesh for a brief half hour. Rufus King was elected to Congress in 1784, and was annually re-elected until 1789. In March, 1786, he married Mary, the only and lovely daughter of John Alsop (whose fine portrait graces the May number of the Magazine), then only in her sixteenth year. She was very much admired for her culture and genius as well as for her remarkable beauty. Next adjoining the City Hall to the south stood the large yellow homestead of the Verplancks, where was born in 1786 the gifted Gulian C. Verplanck, eminent through a long life in law, letters, theology, and politics. His fair-haired young mother, the daughter of William Samuel Johnson, President of Columbia College, died when he was three years old, and he was left to the care of his grandmother, by whom he was carefully reared. Mr. Bryant, in a discourse before the New York Historical Society in 1870, spoke of the grandmother as "a lively little lady, often seen walking up Wall Street dressed in pink satin and in dainty high-heeled shoes, with a quaint jeweled watch swinging from her waist." Secretary and Mrs. Jay occupied the first place in New York society, by reason of his dignified position, and, it might be added, the first place in American society, for no man stood above Jay during the half dozen years prior to