Part 8
The members were pledged to attend themselves, and procure the attendance of strangers, punctually at the hour of eight o’clock; and “the sumptuary code enjoined, as consentaneous with the scheme and objects in view, that the entertainments should be marked by unexpensive, if not frugal, simplicity.” No tea, coffee, cakes, or wine were to be served before supper. It was recommended that the collation consist of one course, and be so prepared as to dispense with the use of knives at table. No ice-creams were allowed. This in 1828.
In 1835 Mr. Job R. Tyson bought Dr. Caspar Wistar’s old house, at Fourth and Prune Streets, when once more it opened its doors to the learned and jovial brotherhood.
In 1840 the number of citizens who could be invited was raised to forty, while in the years succeeding the organization of the club many guests from over the sea, and from the different States of the Union, had been welcomed to the Wistar Parties. One of the latter writes,--
“During my stay in Philadelphia I was present at several of these Wistar meetings, and always returned from them with increased conviction of their beneficial tendency.
“These meetings are held by rotation at the houses of the different members. The conversation is generally literary or scientific, and, as the party is usually very large, it can be varied at pleasure. Philosophers eat like other men, and the precaution of an excellent supper is by no means found to be superfluous. It acts, too, as a gentle emollient on the acrimony of debate. No man can say a harsh thing with his mouth full of turkey, and disputants forget their differences in unity of enjoyment.”
Better known abroad in the early part of the century than any other American city, all travellers of consequence came to Philadelphia. Among these we find such men as General Moreau, counted after Bonaparte the greatest general in the French Republic; the younger Murat, who married Miss Fraser, of South Carolina; the Marquis de Grouchy, whose name will be forever associated with the defeat of Waterloo; the poet Moore, whose singing drew tears from the beautiful eyes of Mrs. Joseph Hopkinson; the Prince de Canino, son-in-law of Joseph Bonaparte, ex-king of Spain, who, himself residing at Bordentown until 1830, was doubtless a guest of the Wistar Association, although, after the fashion of princes, it was his pleasure to entertain rather than to be entertained. These and many more, including President Madison, and the witty and able Virginia gentleman William Short, who, as secretary of legation under Thomas Jefferson, chargé-d’affaires to the French Republic, and minister to Spain and the Netherlands, had seen much of foreign official and social life. An acquaintance of Talleyrand, himself a diplomatist, life abroad offered Mr. Short many attractions, which a friend and contemporary assures us were more than balanced by the terrors of the sea, which menaced him in the form of sea-sickness. This gentleman, a surviving member of the Wistar Association of 1837, recalls no social intercourse in Old-World cities more delightful than that of this informal club.
While on a visit to Philadelphia in 1825, the Duke of Saxe-Weimar makes the following entry in his journal:
“At Mr. Walsh’s I found a numerous assembly, mostly of scientific and literary gentlemen. This assembly is called ‘Wistar Party.’... The conversation generally relates to literary and scientific topics. I unexpectedly met Mr. E. Livingston in this assembly. I was also introduced to the mayor of the city, Mr. [Joseph] Watson, as well as to most of the gentlemen present, whose interesting conversation afforded me much entertainment.”
This German nobleman, who was well “wined and dined” in old Philadelphia, seems to have possessed a happy faculty of replying aptly to the pretty compliments paid him and his country by Judge Peters, Mr. Charles J. Ingersoll, and other social magnates of the period. To the toast “Weimar, the native country of letters,” he replied, with ready wit, “Pennsylvania, the asylum of unfortunate Germans.” Can we not hear the laughter and applause that greeted that toast? They were not allowed to subside, either, as the venerable Judge Peters followed the toast with a song which he had composed the previous evening, and which he sang with great vivacity and spirit. Are there any such gatherings now, and do our octogenarians sing songs of their own composing with vivacity?
The Duke of Saxe-Weimar describes another Wistar Party, this at the house of Colonel Clement C. Biddle, at which John Quincy Adams, then President of the United States, was a guest. Of him he says,--
“The President is about sixty years old, of rather short stature, with a bald head, and of a very plain and worthy appearance. He speaks little, but what he does speak is to the purpose. I must confess that I seldom in my life felt so true and sincere a reverence as at the moment when this honorable gentleman, whom eleven millions of people have thought worthy to elect as their chief magistrate, shook hands with me.”
In the same year Chief Justice Tilghman records a Wistar Party held at his house, at which were present such citizens as Roberts Vaux, Mathew Carey, the Irish protectionist, his son Henry C. Carey, political economist and writer, Joseph Hopkinson, the elder Peale, who had studied at the Royal Academy in London and came home to paint portraits of Washington and his generals, Dr. Frederick Beasley, and many more, with a sprinkling of foreigners,--Mr. Pedersen, Minister from Denmark to the United States, the Prince de Canino, who was an enthusiastic ornithologist, Colonel Beckwith, who had left a leg upon the field of Waterloo, and several French chevaliers. The whole company, numbering about one hundred, was regaled with chicken salad, oysters, ices, wine, punch, and the like, at an expense of twenty-four dollars and eighty-nine cents. This moderate sum, the accurate transcriber tells us, included the whiskey for the punch, the spermaceti candles, oil for the lamps, and extra fire in one room.
Later in the history of the Wistar Club, after the good founders had gone, and left it to its own devices, serious innovations were made in the old sumptuary code, whereupon severe strictures were instituted against the dainty fare set before the wise men, in the local journals and elsewhere. One of these attacks upon the Wistarians appeared in the then recently established _Daily Courier_, and is interesting not only because the slashing editorial of the young writer ended the brief career of his paper, but because its demise is intimately connected with the rise of two prominent journals of to-day. It happened that many of the subscribers to the _Daily Courier_ were members or guests of the Wistar Parties. These persons instantly withdrew their patronage. The _Courier_ was shaken to its foundations, and the unfortunate young Scotchman, James Gordon Bennett, whose pen had proved too sharp for Philadelphia, sold his journal to Mr. Jesper Harding, upon which the _Daily Courier_ was merged in the _Pennsylvania Inquirer_, and Mr. Bennett, having transplanted his talents to the more congenial soil of New York, later employed them in founding the _New York Herald_.[28]
Written invitations to the Wistar Parties seem to have been used up to 1835, when Mr. Vaughan first speaks of a printed invitation. This bore the quaint queued head of Dr. Wistar, and is in all respects similar to that issued by the Wistar Association _redivivus_ of 1886.
In 1838 and 1839 printed lists appeared, naming the hosts of the season, and giving the dates of the several entertainments. To these were appended sumptuary regulations, which were of course born to die. Just when the terrapin, game, croquette, and like dainties replaced the original decanters, flanked with ice, cakes, and one substantial course, Mr. Tyson does not record. When the terrapin came, however, it came to stay, until the hot discussions incident to the disturbances of the late civil war routed it and the guests alike.
Thackeray carried away from Philadelphia such pleasant recollections of the Wistar Parties, and the mirth and good cheer there enjoyed, that he thus refers to them in a letter written to Mr. William B. Reed from Washington in 1853. He has just heard of the death of his friend Mr. William Peter, British Consul to Philadelphia.
“Saturday I was to have dined with him, and Mrs. Peter wrote saying he was ill with influenza: he was in bed with his last illness, and there were to be no more Whister parties for him. Will Whister himself, hospitable pig-tailed shade, welcome him to Hades? And will they sit down--no, stand up--to a ghostly supper, devouring the ιφθιμους ψυχας of oysters and all sorts of birds?”
Something else than the mighty oysters impressed the genial novelist, and that was the face and figure of John Irwin, a well-known head-waiter, who so resembled the terrapin over which he presided that Thackeray has, in a few rapid pencil-strokes, put him down on paper as a fine specimen of a diamond-back. Those who still remember Irwin’s great paunch and shining face will recognize his portrait in Mr. Thackeray’s “Orphan of Pimlico.” Thus, this latter-day Bogle, although there arose in his time no poet, like Nicholas Biddle, to embalm his virtues in humorous verse, has, like the “colorless colored man,” been immortalized by the hand of genius.
The pleasing side of Philadelphia social life must have left its impress upon the receptive mind of Thackeray, as he writes from Switzerland in July of the same year,--
“Since my return from the West, it was flying from London to Paris, and _vice versa_, dinners right and left, parties every night. If I had been in Philadelphia I could scarcely have been more feasted. Oh, you unhappy Reed! I see you (after that little supper with McMichael) on Sunday at your own table, when we had that good Sherry-Madeira, turning aside from the wine-cup with your pale face! That cup has gone down this well so often (meaning my own private cavity) that I wonder the cup isn’t broken, and the well as well as it is.... I always remember you and yours, and honest Mac, and Wharton, and Lewis, and kind fellows who have been kind to me and I hope will be kind to me again.”
The “Mac” is evidently Mr. Morton McMichael, to whose whiskey punch Mr. Thackeray alludes with tenderness in another letter, and who is described by all who knew him as the most genial of men, a very “king of good fellows.” So great were his social talents that, like Shenstone’s Frenchwoman who could “draw wit out of a stone,” he possessed the power to redeem from stagnation the dullest of dinners by his happy faculty of giving his best and leading others to do the same.
The “Lewis” alluded to by Mr. Thackeray is Mr. William D. Lewis, more recently dead; another delightful dinner-talker. Possessed of rare _bonhomie_, and furnished with a fund of anecdotes of travel,--for he had lived some years in Russia,--he brought mirth and cheer into the circles to which he was welcomed, and was even known, on occasions, to sing some familiar household verses, as “Home, Sweet Home,” in the Russian language, to the great amusement, if not to the edification, of his hearers.
In 1842, Mr. Tyson records only two of the original members of 1818 still surviving, Dr. R. M. Patterson and Robert Walsh. The kindly face of Mr. Vaughan (Johnny Vaughan, as his intimates called him), first Dean of the Wistar Association, had only lately disappeared from the circle. Although death had sadly thinned the ranks of original membership, a number of honored names filled the blanks: among these, Horace Binney, William M. Meredith, John Sergeant, Joshua Francis Fisher, Judge Kane, Langdon Cheves, from South Carolina, Thomas Isaac Wharton, and, there always being a large proportion of medical men, such distinguished sons of the healing art as Dr. Robert Hare, Dr. Thomas C. James, Dr. John K. Mitchell, Dr. Isaac Hays, physician and writer, Dr. Franklin Bache and his friend Dr. George B. Wood closely associated with him in medical literature, Dr. Charles D. Meigs, and Moncure Robinson, Esq., who, among the many who have come and gone, still [1887] recalls delightful evenings spent at the Wistar Parties. Dr. Isaac Lea was in 1843 Dean of the association, which office he held until the stirring events of ’60 and ’61 scattered its members, not again to unite until 1886, within a few months of his death, when he was succeeded in this office by his son, Mr. Henry C. Lea.[29]
Writing during this hiatus of many years, Dr. George B. Wood says,--
“I have always regarded the Wistar Club not merely as an ornamental feature of Philadelphia society, but as a very useful institution; bringing as it did persons together of various pursuits, who would not otherwise perhaps have met, thus removing prejudices and conciliating friendly feeling; and, by a regulation regarding strangers which gave each member the right to introduce one or more to the meetings, facilitating their intercourse with citizens, and contributing to the reputation of our city for hospitality.”
It may be that these words hold something of a prophecy for the future, as well as a _résumé_ of the past; and now that the old-time invitation, bearing the “hospitable pig-tailed” head of the founder, has once more begun to circulate, an important influence may be exercised by it, in drawing together the best and ablest of the various professions and callings of this city, and in affording, as of old, a pleasant and informal means of entertaining stranger guests. Such a club as this forecasts a meeting-ground where British and Continental scientists and literati, professional men and men of affairs, may clasp hands with American workers on the same lines; where the large philanthropy of England may meet an even larger New-World philanthropy; where, under some hospitable roof, questions in social and political science, or the latest discovery in chemistry or physics, may be discussed over croquettes and oysters, and with a dash of hock or sherry (no sparkling wines are allowed) the seas that wash widely-separated shores shall be bridged in an instant, and, meeting on some congenial ground of knowledge, of thought, or of interest, Old and New World denizens shall feel the delightful thrill of a common brotherhood.
FOOTNOTES:
[25] Dr. Wistar married, in 1798, Elizabeth Mifflin, granddaughter of John Mifflin, the Councillor.
[26] Dr. Rush himself humorously related how his patriotism had interfered with his practice, a number of persons refusing to be treated by him for yellow fever for the very good reason that he had signed the Declaration of Independence.
[27] Since writing the above, it appears upon the indisputable authority of the first charter for the city of Philadelphia, discovered in 1887 by Messrs. Edward P. Allinson and Boies Penrose, that the honored name of Edward Shippen, which so long headed the list of Philadelphia mayors, must be relegated to a second place, Humphrey Morray having been the first mayor of Philadelphia.
[28] Casper Souder’s History of Chestnut Street.
[29] The Saturday Night Parties, held during the war and for some years after, have been spoken of as direct successors of the Wistar Association. These, however, were not composed of members of the Philosophical Society, and the discussions at the meetings naturally partook of the heat and excitement of the hour, rather than of the calmer literary and scientific debate for which the Wistar Parties were designed. The only lineal descendants of the Wistar Association of 1818 are the parties recently organized, which bear the name of the great physician and scientist in whose honor they were founded.
Strange it is that the maiden meditations of more than two centuries ago should have recently been brought to light in the love-letters of Dorothy Osborne, so full of womanly tenderness, so humorous, so grave and gay by turns, and so valuable for the spirited pictures they give of the life and personages of the day.
Among stacks of dry-as-dust manuscripts, awaiting the discriminating inspection of the antiquarian, are doubtless other letters of sentiment worthy of the world’s reading, even if there are few equal in grace and style to those of the lovely mistress of Chicksands. A few such unknown or forgotten love-letters have come under the observation of the writer,--among these some yellowed pages traced by the hand of William Penn and addressed to Hannah Callowhill, whose name is now handed down to Philadelphians by the street which bears her family name, but who was known to her contemporaries as a woman of strong character and noble qualities, well fitted to be a helpmeet to the good Proprietary. These letters form pleasant reading for a leisure hour, not only on account of their quaint simplicity, but also because of the insight they give into the delicate and refined nature of the man who wrote them.[30]
We are wont to think of the founder of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania as a man deeply immersed in religious questions, in legal business, land surveys and titles,--indeed, in all that affected the welfare of the little colony that he established on the banks of the Delaware. To picture him as an ardent lover requires some imagination, especially at a period when the early romance of his life was buried in the grave of his beloved Gulielma, and he figures on the pages of history as a widower, past middle age, with three children. Yet among his letters to his betrothed are some that glow with all the warmth and ardor of youthful affection, while, as befits a man of his years and position, they contain wise reflections on life, and passages marked by the prudence, the forethought, and the practical grasp that come with riper age; and always they are deeply and sincerely religious.
This Quaker lover does not write a sonnet to the eyebrows of his mistress, nor does he say, like a modern widower whose _billet doux_ has come under our notice, that he has “lost his married partner and would be glad to renew his loss.” He tells her, in grave and simple language, that it is for the qualities of her heart and mind that he loves her and desires to win her, as in the following written from Worminghurst, Penn’s English home, in 1695:
“And now let me tell thee, my Dearest, that tho’ there are many qualitys, for which I admire thee, as well as love thee, yet yt of Compassionating the unhappy is none of the least. And whatsoever pittys has love, for it springs out of the same soft ground; and can never fail, as often as there is occasion to try it. That my Dearest H. has been a Mourner, a Sympathizer, an inhabitant of Dust, and so wean’d from the common tastes of pleasure, yt gratefy other Pallats, does so much exalt her character with me, yt if this were all she brought, she must be a treasure to yt happy man yt has a Title to her. And since, by an unusual goodness, she has made it my Lot, it shall be as much my pleasure as she has made it my duty to make her constantly sensible how much I am so of my obligation to her.”
One of the most tender of these missives includes some family details about Billy’s[31] health, who “is lively yet tender” and has just had his hair cut, and winds up with the following description of a most unromantic hamper which was intended as an offering to the beloved one:
“I presume by the next wagon, there comes an Hamper directed to thy father, the Contents for thee. Viz 3 Gallons of light french Brandy, one of wh’ pray present thy Mother. I ordered 2 lbs of Chocolate to keep them company. My Daughter prays thee to accept of 3 small pots of venson, yt she says will keep well & are of her own manufacture, as were all the last. She is concerned her pig brawn was not ready wc’h she fancys would not have been a disagreeable way of eating a pig, but another season will do. These are little things and yet would express tho’ meanly Love that is Great.”
Was Letitia Penn’s brawn the same sort as that over which dear old Lamb waxed so eloquent in a letter to his friend Manning? It had been sent to him by the cook of Trinity Hall and Caius College, and he says of it,--
“’Tis of all my hobbies the supreme in the eating way. He might have sent sops from the pan, skimmings, crumpets, chips, hog’s lard, the tender brown judiciously scalped from a fillet of veal (dexterously replaced by a salamander), the tops of asparagus, fugitive livers, run-away gizzards of fowls, the eyes of martyred pigs, the red spawn of lobsters, leverets’ ears, and such pretty filchings common to cooks; but these had been ordinary presents, the every-day courtesies of dish-washers to their sweethearts. Brawn was a noble thought.”
At another time William Penn is concerned about the health of his betrothed, and concludes his missive with an earnest recommendation to her to take some pills, that he sends her, at certain hours of the day, and a specified medicinal water, to be imbibed “three days before the full and changes of the moon.”
It appears to have been a not unusual practice among lovers of this period to prescribe for their sweethearts, as we find Dorothy Osborne writing about some infusion of steel in which she drinks Sir William Temple’s health every morning. She vows that it makes her horribly ill, says that it is a “drench that would poison a horse,” and declines to continue its use unless her lover insists upon her doing so. In another of her charming letters she gives Sir William many directions about the care of his precious health, and even does a little quacking on his behalf, sending him a new medicine for his cold, of which she says,--
“’Tis like the rest of my medicines: if it do no good ’twill do no harm and ’twill be no great trouble to take a little on’t now and then; for the taste on’t as it is not excellent, so ’tis not very ill.”
It is well that some of these old letters of sentiment and domestic life are left us, for did we not occasionally catch glimpses of the great men of the past penning tender messages to beloved objects (sometimes, indeed, spelling them very ill), writing about their children and sending them trinkets and gewgaws, they would become to us shadowy personages, very spectres, and hauntings of a dream.