elderly lady. I was charmed with her many reminiscences
of well-known characters, and as I had seen her as well as Ellsler and
all the great _ballerine_ many times, we had many conferences. Somebody
said to her one day, "So you know Mr. Leland?" "Yes," replied Taglioni
in jest, "he was one of my old lovers." This was reported to me, when I
said, "I wish she had told me that thirty years sooner." In 1846
Taglioni owned three palaces in Venice, one of them the Ca' d'oro, and in
1872 she was giving lessons in London. At Mrs. Frank Hill's I made the
acquaintance of the marvellously clever Eugene Schuyler, and at Mr.
Smalley's of the equally amazingly cheeky and gifted "Joaquin" Miller.
Somewhere else I met several times another curious celebrity whom I had
known in America, the Chevalier Wykoff. Though he was almost the type
and proverb of an adventurer, I confess that I always liked him. He was
gentlemanly and kind in his manner, and agreeable and intelligent in
conversation. Though he had been Fanny Ellsler's agent or secretary, and
written those two curiously cool works, "Souvenirs of a Roving
Diplomatist" (he had been employed by Palmerston) and "My Courtship and
its Consequences" (in reference to his having been imprisoned in Italy
for attempting to carry off an elderly heiress), he was also the author
of a really admirable work on the political system of the United States,
which any man may read to advantage. A century ago or more he would have
been a great man in his way. He knew everybody. I believe that as
General Tevis formed his bold ideal of life from much reading of
_condottieri_ or military adventurers, and Robert Hunt from Cooper's
novels, so Wykoff got his inspiration for a career from studying and
admiring the diplomatic _parvenus_ of Queen Anne's time. These
_Bohemiens de la haute volee_, who drew their first motives from study,
are by far more interesting and tolerable than those of an illiterate
type.

One summer when I was at Bateman's, near Newport, with G. H. Boker,
Robert Leroy, and our wives, Leroy reported one day that he had seen
Wykoff, Hiram Fuller, a certain very dashing _prima donna_, and two other
notorieties sitting side by side in a row on the steps of the Ocean
House. I remarked that if there had only been with them the devil and
Lola Montez, the party would have been complete. Leroy was famous for
his quaint _mots_, in which he had a counterpart in "Tom Appleton," of
Bosto