There was another Henry Brevoort in the family.  He it was who built the house that now stands at the northwest corner of the Avenue and Ninth Street.  That Henry was the grandfather of James Renwick, Jr., the architect who built Grace Church and St. Patrick’s Cathedral.  His house was one of the great houses of the early days.  Now known as the De Rham house—­Brevoort sold it in 1857 to Henry De Rham for fifty-seven thousand dollars,—­it still strikes the passer-by on account of its individuality of appearance.  But long before the De Rhams entered in possession it had its romance.  There, the evening of February 24, 1840, was held the first masked ball ever given in New York.  It was, to quote Mr. George S. Hellman, “the most splendid social affair of the first half of the nineteenth century.”  But it was also the last masked ball held in the town for many years.

The name of the British Consul to New York at the time was Anthony Barclay, and he had a daughter.  Her name was Matilda; she is described as having been a belle of great charm and beauty, and as having had a number of suitors.  Of course, after the fashion of all love stories, the suitor favoured by her was the one of whom her parents most disapproved.  He was a young South Carolinian named Burgwyne.  Opposition served only to fan the flame, and the lovers met by stealth, and the gay Southerner wooed the fair Briton in the good old school poetical manner.  In soft communion of fancy they wandered together to far lands; to: 

         “that delightful Province of the Sun,
    The first of Persian lands he shines upon,
    Where all the loveliest children of his beam,
    Flow’rets and fruits, blush over every stream,
    And, fairest of all streams, the Murga roves
    Among Merou’s bright palaces and groves.”

It was “Tom” Moore’s “Lalla Rookh” that was dearest to their hearts.  Then came the great masked ball, to which practically all “society” was invited.

Matilda and Burgwyne agreed to go in the guise of their romantic favourites; she as Lalla Rookh, and he as Feramorz, the young Prince.  She wore “floating gauzes, bracelets, a small coronet of jewels, and a rose-coloured bridal veil.”  His dress was “simple, yet not without marks of costliness, with a high Tartarian cap, and strings of pearls hanging from his flowered girdle of Kaskan.”  Till four o’clock in the morning they danced.  Then, still wearing the costumes of the romantic poem, they slipped away from the ball and were married before breakfast.  It seems quite harmless, and natural, and as it should have been, when we regard it after all the years.  But it caused a great uproar and scandal at the time, and brought masked balls into such odium that there was, a bit later, a fine of one thousand dollars imposed on anyone who should give one,—­one-half to be deducted in case you told on yourself.