As time went on this section—­the Sailors’ Snug Harbour Estate and the Brevoort property—­was destined to become New York’s most fashionable quarter.  Its history is the history of American society, no less, and one can have no difficulty in visualising an era in which a certain naive ceremony combined in piquant fashion with the sturdy solidity of the young and vigorous country.  In the correspondence of Henry Brevoort and Washington Irving and others one gets delightful little pictures—­vignettes, as it were—­of social life of that day.  Mr. Emmet writes begging for some snuff “no matter how old.  It may be stale and flat but cannot be unprofitable!” Brevoort asks a friend to dine “On Thursday next at half-past four o’clock.”  He paints us a quaint sketch of “a little, round old gentleman, returning heel taps into decanters,” at a soiree, adding:  “His heart smote him at beholding the waste & riot of his dear adopted.”  We read of tea drinkings and coaches and his father’s famous blunderbuss or “long gun” which he is presenting to Irving.  And there are other chroniclers of the times.  Lossing, the historian, quotes an anonymous friend as follows: 

“We thought there was a goodly display of wealth and diamonds in those days, but, God bless my soul, when I hear of the millions amassed by the Vanderbilts, Goulds, Millses, Villards and others of that sort, I realise what a poor little doughnut of a place New York was at that early period!”

He goes on to speak of dinner at three—­a formal dinner party at four.  The first private carriage was almost mobbed on Broadway.  Mrs. Jacob Little had “a very showy carriage lined with rose colour and a darky coachman in blue livery.”

Mr. and Mrs. Henry Brevoort’s house stood on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Ninth Street—­it is now occupied by the Charles de Rhams.  And it chanced to be the scene of a certain very pretty little romance which can scarcely be passed over here.

New York, as a matter of course, copied her fashionable standards from older lands.  While Manhattan society was by no means a supine and merely imitative affair, the country was too new not to cling a bit to English and French formalities.  The great ladies of the day made something of a point of their “imported amusements” as having a specific claim on fashionable favour.  So it came about that the fascinating innovation of the masked ball struck the fancy of fashionable New York.  There was something very daring about the notion; it smacked of Latin skies and manners and suggested possibilities of romance both licensed and not which charmed the ladies, even as it abashed them.  There were those who found it a project scarcely in good taste; it is said indeed that there was no end of a flutter concerning it.  But be that as it may, the masked ball was given,—­the first that New York had ever known, and, it may be mentioned, the very last it was to know for many a long, discreet year!