if merely for the sake of learning a certain point of view, it is
amusing to turn over those old volumes dealing with the sunshine and
shadow of the city of the sixties. High Life and Moneyocracy, we are
told, were synonymous. To use the Tennysonian line, "Every door was
barred with gold, and opened but to golden keys." "If you wish parties,
soirees, balls, that are elegant, attractive, and genteel (how they
loved those dreadful adjectives 'elegant' and 'genteel'!) you will not
find them among the snobbish clique, who, with nothing but money,
attempt to rule New York." The words are of the clerical visitor before
quoted. "Talent, taste, and refinement do not dwell with these. But high
life has no passport except money. If a man has this, though destitute
of character and brains, he is made welcome. One may come from Botany
Bay or St. James; with a ticket-of-leave from a penal colony or St.
Cloud; if he has diamond rings and a coach, all places will be open to
him. The leaders of upper New York were, a few years ago, porters,
stable boys, coal-heavers, pickers of rags, scrubbers of floors, and
laundry women. Coarse, rude, uncivil, and immoral many of them still
are. Lovers of pleasure and men of fashion bow and cringe to such, and
approach hat in hand. One of our new-fledged millionaires gave a ball in
his stable. The invited came with tokens of delight. The host, a few
years ago, was a ticket-taker at one of our ferries, and would have
thankfully blacked the boots or done any menial service for the people
who clamour for the honour of his hand. At the gate of Central Park,
every day splendid coaches may be seen, in which sit large, fat, coarse
women, who carry with them the marks of the wash-tub." That was the kind
of hot shot that the rural districts wanted from those they sent to look
into the iniquities of the Metropolis. At once it made them sit up and
filled them with a sense of their own sanctity.

According to the same ingenuous chronicler, the most famous figure in
the social life of the New York of the sixties, the later Petronius, or
the forerunner of Mr. Ward McAllister, was Brown, the sexton of Grace
Church, which, for many years, had been the fashionable centre.
"Arrogant old Isaac Brown," Mrs. Burton Harrison called him in her
"Recollections, Grave and Gay," "the portly sexton who transmitted
invitations for the elect, protested to one of his patronesses that he
really could not undertake to 'run society'