Part 6

Of Judge Peters’s clever sayings we find numerous records. As he grew older, his sharp nose and chin approached each other closely. A friend observed to him, one day, that his nose and chin would soon be at loggerheads. “Very likely,” he replied, “for hard words often pass between them.” Once, while he was Speaker of the House of Assembly, one of the members, in crossing the room, tripped on the carpet and fell flat. The House burst into laughter, while the judge, with the utmost gravity, cried, “Order, order, gentlemen! Do you not see that a member is on the floor?” Unceremonious, communicative, friendly, Judge Peters was the life of every circle that he entered; correcting Mayor Wharton at a dinner when he called to the waiter, “John, more wine,” saying that it was a _demi_john that he needed, while he himself “drank like a fish,” as he expressed it, from his goblet of water, requiring no artificial aid to brighten wits that were always keen and scintillating.

Mr. George Ord, who was a delightful _raconteur_ as well as a learned naturalist, took great pleasure in relating a story of his friend Dr. Abercrombie, a fellow-member of the society. Dr. James Abercrombie, sometime rector of Christ and St. Peter’s Churches, was a divine of the old school, who despised not the good things of this lower world while engaged in preparation for those of the higher. Once, while on a pastoral visit to the small town of Shrewsbury, New Jersey, where an Episcopal church had been established, Dr. Abercrombie was regaled with some very fine old Madeira wine, which he drank with evident appreciation, and probably some surprise at finding anything so choice in that region of the country. The next day, according to Mr. Ord’s story, the good parson chose for his text that most appropriate verse from the Acts of the Apostles, in which St. Paul says, “And the barbarous people showed us no little kindness.”

Another clerical member of the learned fraternity was William White, one of our early American bishops, who was an ardent patriot and a genial companion, as well as the most devout of churchmen. A warm friend of Benjamin West, the artist, Bishop White was fond of telling how he helped West to secure his bride, Miss Betty Shewell. Mr. West was in England, and so busy painting for the court and royal family that he could not come over to America to marry his _fiancée_; but, as his father was about to sail for England, he wrote to Miss Shewell, begging her to join his father, and make the voyage with him. Miss Shewell’s brother, who was averse to the match, chiefly because West was an impecunious genius, put a stop to the proceedings by confining the fair bride-elect in an upper room. Bishop White, then a very young man, Dr. Franklin, and Mr. Francis Hopkinson determined to help on the “course of true love” by facilitating Miss Shewell’s escape to the ship, which was waiting for her at Chester. This they did by means of a romantic rope-ladder and a carriage around the corner. Miss Shewell with her maid reached the ship in good time, and a few weeks after was married to Benjamin West in the English chapel of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields. In telling this story, the kindly bishop was wont to add, gleefully, “Ben was a good fellow, and deserved a good wife, and I would do the same thing over again to-day,”--a sentiment, we may be sure, that was greeted with applause by the gravest of the philosophers, they being no exception to the rule that “all the world loves a lover.” An active member of the society, and for years one of its counsellors, Bishop White was present on all important occasions, grave or gay. Having known General Washington and the other great men of the Revolution, and met and conversed with Samuel Johnson while in England, his was one of the few familiar faces that greeted the Marquis de Lafayette when he revisited America in 1824.

Another face to be seen for many successive years at the meetings of the society, and at its annual dinners, was that of Peter S. Du Ponceau, the French lawyer and philologist, who lived here for so many years. He has left behind him pictures of some of his learned associates that prove to us that these gentlemen, whose faces look down upon us gravely from century-old portraits, were, on occasions, as full of quips and quirks and fun and frolic as the most jovial collegian of our day. Of his frequent journeys to Washington to attend the sessions of the Supreme Court of the United States, in company with Mr. Ingersoll, Mr. William Rawle, Mr. Lewis, and Mr. Edward Tilghman, he says,--

“As soon as we were out of the city and felt the flush of air, we were like school-boys in the playground on a holiday; and we began to kill time by all the means that our imagination could suggest. Flashes of wit shot their coruscations on all sides; puns of the genuine Philadelphia stamp were handed about; old college stories were revived; macaroni Latin was spoken with great purity; songs were sung,--even classical songs, among which I recollect the famous Bacchanalian of the Archdeacon of Oxford, _Mihi est propositum in tabernâ mori_; in short, we might have been taken for anything else but the grave counsellors of the celebrated bar of Philadelphia.”

Mr. Du Ponceau it is who is accredited with the well-known story of the lawyer whose client came in and deposed that “his brother had died and made a will.” A gentleman who read law with the facetious Frenchman relates that it was only when a fee was placed in Mr. Du Ponceau’s hand that he translated the phrase into, “Ah! you mean that your brother made a will and died.” We can imagine the laugh with which the philosophers would greet this most practical of jokes.

Quite as celebrated as the dinners of the society were Mr. John Vaughan’s breakfasts, which held the same prominence in the social life of the time as Dr. Wistar’s evening parties or as the Sunday afternoon vespers of Mr. Henry C. Carey, where, during the late war, and after its close, soldiers, politicians, statesmen, and civilians met together and discussed the great issues and events that shook the nation from 1860 to 1865. So at Mr. Vaughan’s breakfasts were discussed the agitating questions of the last decade of the century, Federalists and Democratic-Republicans, as they were beginning to be called, meeting together around his hospitable board. Mr. Vaughan himself was a Federalist, although not a violent partisan. Riding, one day, with Mr. Jefferson, his horse became unmanageable, disturbing somewhat Mr. Vaughan’s serenity, upon which the latter, gathering his reins firmly, muttered under his breath, “This horse--this horse is as bad as a Democrat!” “Oh, no,” replied the high-priest and leader of the party; “if he were a Democrat, he would have thrown _you_ long ago.” Mr. Vaughan, for many years librarian and treasurer of the society, had his rooms in the building on Fifth Street, in one of which, before its generous old-fashioned fireplace and high carved mantel, Washington sat for his well-known portrait by the elder Peale. The general, whom Mr. Vaughan numbered among his friends, had already been elected a member of the society; but we find few records of his presence at its meetings or at the famous breakfasts. One of these breakfasts, given in the latter years of Mr. Vaughan’s life, is still remembered by Dr. William H. Furness, then a young man, recently come from New England to take charge of the First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia. The breakfast lasted from nine until one. Whether the guests breakfasted upon roast peacocks and nightingales’ tongues, or upon plain beefsteak and chops, Dr. Furness does not remember; but he will never forget the circle gathered around that table. There were John Quincy Adams, Colonel Drayton of South Carolina, Mr. Du Ponceau, and Dr. Channing, who exercised such an influence on the religious thought of New England, and of whom the orthodox clergy were wont to say that his theology was “Calvinism with the bones taken out.” A goodly company of leading minds, “joined later,” says Dr. Furness, by Albert Gallatin and the Rev. William Ware, pastor of the First Unitarian Church in New York. Among other visitors of note entertained by Mr. Vaughan were Sir Charles Lyell, and George Robins Gliddon, the Egyptologist, who were both in this country about 1841.

Mr. John Vaughan, whose most distinguishing trait was love for his fellow-men, whom, it was said, he took more delight in serving than most men take in making and hoarding dollars, belonged to a family distinguished in statesmanship, letters, and affairs. The Vaughan brothers were of English birth, sons of Samuel Vaughan, a London merchant trading with America. The most prominent of this large family was Benjamin Vaughan, M.D., LL.D., sometime secretary to Lord Shelburne, and acting as confidential messenger in the peace negotiations between Great Britain and America in 1783. Deeply tinctured with the revolutionary spirit of the time, a liberal to the extent of admiring the system of the Directory in France, and writing in favor of it, Benjamin Vaughan finally found it expedient to quit the Old World for the more congenial political atmosphere of the New. He settled in Hallowell, Maine, as did his brother Charles, where descendants of the name still reside. The death of Dr. Benjamin Vaughan, of Hallowell, was announced to the society in 1836, and Mr. Merrick, his kinsman, was appointed to prepare a notice of him. Another brother, Samuel, settled in Jamaica; William, the successful banker of the family, remained in London; while John, one of the younger brothers, came to Philadelphia, where he established himself as a wine merchant, and a prominent member of the First Unitarian Church. Generous to a fault, “Johnny Vaughan,” as his intimates were wont to call him, seems to have objected to parting with but one single earthly possession,--his umbrella. A lady who knew Mr. Vaughan when he was a very old gentleman remembers one of flaming red, whose color should have insured its staying qualities. A story is also told of his having printed on the outside of another one in large characters, “This umbrella was stolen from John Vaughan.” One day a friend of Mr. Vaughan’s started off with this umbrella, and, quite unconscious of its equivocal inscription, hoisted it in broad day. Mr. Vaughan’s Portuguese office boy, who could speak or read no English, but who knew the umbrella, and what the printing stood for, chanced to meet the gentleman who carried it, and with speechless but entire devotion to his master’s interests followed it, and “froze on to it,” as the narrator expressed it, with such persistency that the holder was fain to relinquish it and make his escape from the jeers of the by-standers.

It was over such a circle of learned men and _beaux-esprits_ that Mr. Jefferson was called to preside, when he came to Philadelphia, in 1797, to act as Vice-President of the United States in an uncongenial Federal administration. It is not strange that, with his scholarly and scientific tastes, he found in the rooms of the Philosophical Society a grateful retreat from political wrangling and the cares of state. Party feeling ran so high, at this period, that “social intercourse between members of the two parties ceased,” says Mr. Parton, “and old friends crossed the street to avoid saluting one another. Jefferson declined invitations to ordinary social gatherings, and spent his leisure hours in the circle that met in the rooms of the Philosophical Society.” Not that its membership was Republican, many of its prominent members being Federalists; notably, Dr. Benjamin Rush, Chief Justice Tilghman, Judge Peters, Jared Ingersoll, who was Federalist candidate for the Vice-Presidency of the United States in 1812, Dr. Robert Patterson, and Mr. Du Ponceau. This was a place, however, where science, art, and literature occupied the ground and where politics and party differences were forgotten in the discussion of some subject that touched the general weal, as when Dr. Caspar Wistar discovered a new bone; or Robert Patterson presented a paper on improved ship-pumps; or Jonathan Williams one on a new mode of refining sugar; or when John Fitch exhibited “the model, with a drawing and description, of a machine for working a boat against the stream by means of a steam-engine;” or, later, when Mr. Charles Goodyear was induced, by Franklin Peale, to demonstrate to the society that vulcanized rubber could be made from the juice of the _cahuchu_ tree. And here, as if to prove that science and religion may be allied in closest union, came two distinguished Moravian divines, John Heckewelder and the Rev. Lewis D. de Schweinitz, the latter with his “_Synopsis Fungorum in America_.”

John Adams, the Federalist President, was a member of the Philosophical Society, and speaks of it with warm admiration. Comparing Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, he says, in one of his letters to his wife,--

“Particular gentlemen here [in Philadelphia], who have improved upon their education by travel, shine; but in general old Massachusetts outshines her younger sisters. Still, in several particulars they have more wit than we. They have societies, the Philosophical Society particularly, which excites a scientific emulation, and propagates their fame. If ever I get through this scene of politics and war, I will spend the remainder of my days in endeavoring to instruct my countrymen in the art of making the most of their abilities and virtues, an art which they have hitherto too much neglected. A philosophical society shall be established at Boston, if I have wit and address enough to accomplish it, some time or other. Pray, set Brother Cranch’s philosophical head plodding upon this project. Many of his lucubrations would have been published and preserved for the benefit of mankind, and for his honor, if such a club had existed.”

Mr. Madison, who was far more congenial to Mr. Jefferson, politically, than the sturdy New Englander, had been for years a member of the society; but he was out of office now, and living quietly at his rural home in Orange County, Virginia. It was during his residence here, in 1794, that the sprightly widow, who afterwards became his wife, writes of her first meeting with “the great little Madison.” She tells us, in her charming letters, that Aaron Burr brought him to see her. On this occasion she wore “a mulberry-colored satin, with a silk tulle kerchief over her neck, and on her head an exquisitely dainty little cap, from which an occasional uncropped curl would escape.”

These were still days of picturesque dressing, with both men and women. “Jeffersonian simplicity” had not yet come in, in full force. Watson, the annalist, describes Mr. Jefferson, a few years earlier, in “a long-waisted white cloth coat, scarlet breeches and vest, a cocked hat, shoes and buckles, and white silk hose,”--an elegant figure, the life and centre of the group of men gathered together in the society’s rooms on Fifth Street. The great Rittenhouse had, in 1797, set forth upon a wider range among the stars; but Dr. Benjamin Rush was there,--physician, scientist, philanthropist, and statesman, a host in himself. His kindly face and the recollections of his contemporaries tell us that he was a pleasant companion, with all his learning, which cannot always be said of the learned ones of the earth. There also was the Rev. William Smith, first provost of the University of Pennsylvania, a man of science as well as an able divine; Dr. Barton, nephew of Dr. Rittenhouse, an original worker, who contributed largely to the scientific literature of the day, and gave to Americans their first elementary treatise on botany; and Dr. Caspar Wistar, the learned physician and genial companion, who not only enriched the society by his own work and teachings, but by his correspondence with Humboldt and Soemmering in Germany, Camper in Holland, Sylvester in Geneva, Pole and Hope in Great Britain, and many more of that ilk, kept its members _en rapport_ with scientific work abroad. Dr. Wistar succeeded Dr. Rush as President of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, which early uttered its protest against slavery. Nor was Dr. Wistar solely interested in the cause of the negro; that of the American Indian, which we are wont to regard as one of the latest fads in the philanthropic world, also engaged his attention at this early date.

Dr. Wistar was elected president of the Philosophical Society on the resignation of Mr. Jefferson, in 1815. Some years prior to this, Dr. Wistar introduced to its circle the Baron von Humboldt, whom he invited to that smaller coterie of learned men, at his own house, which composed the Wistar Club. A gala day it must have been at the Philosophical Society when it opened its doors to this greatest naturalist of his time, perhaps of any time. The Baron von Humboldt was returning from an extended tour in South America, Mexico, and the West Indies. His young friends Montufar and Bonpland were with him,--the same Bonpland who later gave the Empress Josephine flower-seeds from the West Indies to plant at Malmaison, who became her intendant there, and who stood by her bedside when she was dying.

Another attractive figure in this group of learned men is William Tilghman, Chief Justice of Pennsylvania, the sound lawyer, ripe scholar, and true gentleman, as his biographer calls him. Perhaps the highest praise we can award to him now is to record that, although Southern born and owning slaves, he expressed, with regard to slavery, a “fervent wish to see the evils of this institution mitigated, and if possible extinguished,” freeing his own slaves by a plan of gradual emancipation. Mr. Tilghman was connected through his mother, Anne Francis, with the supposed author of the Letters of Junius; and, curiously enough, the strongest evidence yet found that the letters were written by Sir Philip Francis has come through correspondence with his American relatives. Interesting as is all that relates to this literary puzzle of more than a century, the incident that led to the recent discoveries is like a _conte de fées_, turning upon some anonymous verses sent to a lady at Bath, in which she is told that

“In the School of the Graces, by Venus attended, Belinda improves every hour.”

The fair “Belinda,” Miss Giles in every-day life, is quite sure that the clever verses came from Sir Philip Francis, who danced with her through a whole evening at Bath. In fact, she recognized the handwriting of some of Woodfall’s fac-similes of the letters of Junius. She has an anonymous note that accompanied the verses, which is, she thinks, very like the Junius handwriting. The investigation becomes exciting; the experts, Messrs. Chabot and Netherclift, study the note and verses profoundly, and finally come to the conclusion that Junius might have written the note, but not the verses. The Hon. Edward Twisleton is deeply interested in the search, and is loath to give up this promising leading, when lo! there comes from over the sea a letter, nearly a hundred years old, in which Richard Tilghman, in Philadelphia, writes to his cousin, Sir Philip Francis,--

“You are very tenacious of your epigram. I observe you contend for it, as if your reputation as a Poet depended on it. I did not condemn the Composition, I only said that it was not an Original, and I say so still; but yet I am ready to allow that you can _weave_ Originals, because in the School of the Graces by Venus attended, Belinda improves every Hour.”

Was not this a coincidence? The Franciscans were delighted, especially as the experts were ready to affirm that the handwriting of the verses was that of Richard Tilghman, and that it was evident that he had copied the verses for Sir Philip. As if to make all complete, it was found that Richard Tilghman was at Bath, with his kinsman, at the time the verses were sent. Nothing, that has not been absolutely proven, has ever come closer to proof, and so it remains the Tantalus cup of the _littérateur_, although there are many who find the evidence quite conclusive that Francis and Junius were one and the same.

Charles Willson Peale, the artist, known as the elder Peale, was curator of the Philosophical Society for many years, and one of its most active members. He did good work in many lines, being a man of scientific tastes and large public spirit. The society owes him a debt of gratitude for handing down to this generation portraits of its most illustrious officers and members. Mr. Peale rented a number of rooms in the old house on Fifth Street, having his museum in the building, and bringing up there his family of artist children, Raphael, Rembrandt, Titian, Van-dyck, and Rubens,--names still known in American art, that of Rembrandt being the most distinguished. In 1796 Mr. Peale presented to the assembled philosophers a son four months and four days old, born in the building, requesting them to name him. The society, upon this, unanimously agreed that the child should be called Franklin, after their chief founder and first president. “Franklin Peale,” says his biographer, “did not disgrace his sponsors. He grew up thoughtful and philosophical.” His genius was in the mechanical line. He was one of the founders of the Franklin Institute, and for many years discharged with great ability the office of chief coiner at the United States Mint.

One of Mr. Peale’s friends, who became an active and valued member of the society, was the learned Abbé de Serra, Portuguese Minister to the United States. This reverend gentleman scandalized Mrs. Peale, whose neatness was phenomenal, by appearing at her door so dusty and shabby (he was not a handsome man at his best) that the dainty Quakeress waved him away from her spotless threshold, saying, “No, my good man, I have no time to attend to you now;” little thinking that the “good man” was the expected guest in whose honor she had donned her best satin gown, and prepared a savory repast, whose crowning triumph was a dish of asparagus from Mr. Peale’s garden, then a greater rarity than now. The Abbé had been on a geological tramp with Mr. Peale, and when that gentleman rallied his wife on treating his friend and guest like a beggar, the excellent lady justified herself by saying that, after all, he could not be much of a gentleman, as he “helped himself to the asparagus with his fingers;” eating it, of course, after the French fashion.

Another _habitué_ of Mr. Peale’s house, and a frequent attendant at the meetings of the society, was Charles Lucien Bonaparte, Prince de Canino. He was the nephew and son-in-law of Joseph Bonaparte, ex-king of Spain, and while in America resided in a house on the estate of his uncle, near Bordentown, New Jersey. This young prince pursued his studies in ornithology in the United States, making important contributions to the works of Wilson. A man of wide scientific knowledge, and a member of nearly all the learned societies of Europe, the Prince de Canino gave a decided impulse to the study of natural history in Italy, which was his home, and while in Philadelphia was an active and interested member of the Philosophical Society, contributing original papers and making valuable donations of books to its library.