interesting coincidence.  He thought the world might well congratulate America upon being the Geographical Apotheosis of that great unspotted character, who, while he yet lived, was prospectively her typical impersonation.  The three stars by a more than tenfold increase have expanded into thirty-three; the glorious Issue has abundantly vindicated every antecedent fact; and your whole emergent eagle, fully plumed, is now long risen from its eyrie and soars sublimely to the sun in heaven.”  I may venture as an end to all this to quote a bit from my home letter.  “At 6 o’clock, and thereafter till 12, I was the honoured guest at the enclosed splendid banquet.  Our English ambassador sat on one side of the chairman and I on the other; the newspaper will save me all the trouble of a long account; but it was altogether one of the best triumphs I have ever achieved:  see the papers.  My dinner was very light, terrapin soup, pate de foie gras aux truffes, and sweetbread:  with a deluge of iced water, and very little wine.  My two speeches raised whirlwinds of applause, and took the company by storm.  It was a most important opportunity for me, and, by God’s help, I met it manfully.  All the principal people of Maryland were there, besides our own minister; with Lady Bulwer in a side room and that nice young fellow Lytton; and there were many other distinguished strangers.  You should have heard the shouts and cheers which greeted the points of my speech, and the after congratulations crowded about me.  I begin to feel that if I had had common chances I should have been an orator.  When I kindle up, my steam-horse goes off, and carries all his audience with him.  While I was speaking, the people moved up en masse, and they gave me three cheers upstanding when I had done.”

* * * * *

Another memorable event was a grand dinner given to Washington Irving and myself, as chief guests amongst others, by Prince Astor at his palatial residence in New York.  As for the profusion of gold plate, glittering glass, innumerable yellow wax-candles in ormolu chandeliers, and general exhibition of splendid and luxurious extravagance, and all manner of costly wines and rarest gourmandise, I never have seen its like before or since; and more than this (if I may state the fact without much imputation of vaingloriousness), the intellectual treat was, to my amour propre at least, of a still more exquisite character, when our host protested to his company in a generous and genial speech that, if he could make the exchange, he would give all his wealth for half the literary glory of Washington Irving and Martin Tupper!  We whispered to each other we heartily wished he could.  I strangely missed visiting Irving at his own home, though urgently invited to it; but somehow other pressing engagements hindered, and so it was not to be.

On the same day with the Astorian dinner, Mr. Davis, a man of high social position, had urged me to dine with him, but I could not come as engaged till the evening.  Now he, a local poet himself, had asked me in divers stanzas of fair rhyme; and so, not willing either to beat him in versification or to let him beat me, I made this epigrammatic reply in dog-Latin, which was taken to be rather ’cute:—­