is peril was supposed to be; but we know that the charges
of monarchical tendency made against John Adams had been renewed against
his son--a renewal that seems absurd in case of a man so scrupulously
republican that he would not use a seal ring, and so unambitious that he
always sighed after the quieter walks of literature. Equally absurd was
the charge of extravagance against a man who kept the White House in
better order than his predecessors on less than half the
appropriation--an economy wholly counterbalanced in some minds by the
fact that he had put in a billiard-table. But however all this may have
been, the fact is certain that no president had yet entered the White
House amid such choruses of delight; nor did it happen again until
Jackson's pupil, Van Buren, yielded, amid equal popular enthusiasm, to
another military hero, Harrison.

For the social life of Washington the President had one advantage which
was altogether unexpected, and seemed difficult of explanation by
anything in his earlier career. He had at his command the most courteous
and agreeable manners. Even before the election of Adams, Daniel Webster
had written to his brother: "General Jackson's manners are better than
those of any of the candidates. He is grave, mild, and reserved. My wife
is for him decidedly." And long after, when the president was to pass in
review before those who were perhaps his most implacable opponents, the
ladies of Boston, we have the testimony of the late Josiah Quincy, in
his "Figures from the Past," that the personal bearing of this obnoxious
official was most unwillingly approved. Mr. Quincy was detailed by
Governor Lincoln, on whose military staff he was, to attend President
Jackson everywhere when visiting Boston in 1833; and this narrator
testifies that, with every prejudice against Jackson, he found him
essentially "a knightly personage--prejudiced, narrow, mistaken on many
points, it might be, but vigorously a gentleman in his high sense of
honor, and in the natural, straightforward courtesies which are easily
distinguished from the veneer of policy." Sitting erect on his horse, a
thin, stiff type of military strength, he carried with him in the
streets a bearing of such dignity that staid old Bostonians, who had
refused even to look upon him from their windows, would finally be
coaxed into taking one peep, and would then hurriedly bring forward
their little daughters to wave their handkerchiefs. He wrought, Mr.