as the absurd Tichborne Claimant found supporters.  But Butler’s right to “Nothing to Wear” was fully substantiated.  Horace Greeley made the controversy the subject of a vigorous editorial in the “Tribune,” and “Harper’s Weekly,” in which the poem had originally appeared, pointed out that although the verses were published in February, the spurious claim was not put forward until July.  Writing of “Nothing to Wear” forty years later, W.D.  Howells said: 

“For the student of our literature ‘Nothing to Wear’ has the interest and value of satire in which our society life came to its full consciousness for the first time.  To be sure there had been the studies of New York called ‘The Potiphar Papers,’ in which Curtis had painted the foolish and unlovely face of our fashionable life, but with always an eye on other methods and other models; and ‘Nothing to Wear’ came with the authority and the appeal of something quite indigenous in matter and manner.  It came winged, and equipped to fly wide and to fly far, as only verse can, with a message for the grand-children of ‘Flora McFlimsey,’ which it delivers today in perfectly intelligible terms.

“It does not indeed find her posterity in Madison Square.  That quarter has long since been delivered over to hotels and shops and offices, and the fashion that once abode there has fled to upper Fifth Avenue, to the discordant variety of handsome residences which overlook the Park.  But it finds her descendants quite one with her in spirit, and as little clothed to their lasting satisfaction.”

The nuptials that Edmund Clarence Stedman satirized in “The Diamond Wedding” united Miss Frances Amelia Bartlett and the Marquis Don Estaban de Santa Cruz de Oviedo, and were held in October, 1859, under the direction of “the fat and famous Brown, Sexton of Grace Church.”  Miss Bartlett, a tall and willowy blonde, still in her teens, was the daughter of a retired lieutenant in the United States Navy.  The Bartlett home was in West Fourteenth Street, a few doors from the Avenue.  The groom, many years the bride’s senior, and of strikingly unprepossessing appearance, was a Cuban of great wealth.  The wedding was the talk of the town, and Stedman, then a young man of twenty-six, satirized the ill-mating in a poem that appeared first in the New York “Tribune.”  The poem began: 

    “I need not tell,
    How it befell;
    (Since Jenkins has told the story
    Over and over and over again,
    And covered himself with glory!)
    How it befell, one summer’s day,
    The King of the Cubans passed that way,
    King January’s his name, they say,
    And fell in love with the Princess May,
    The reigning belle of Manhattan. 
    Nor how he began to smirk and sue,
    And dress as lovers who come to woo,
    Or as Max Maretzek or Jullien do,
    When they sit, full bloomed, in the ladies’ view,
    And flourish the wondrous baton.