“From the Madisonian, Washington, Monday, March 17th, 1842.“The Last Levee of the Season.
“From the Madisonian, Washington, Monday, March 17th, 1842.“The Last Levee of the Season.
“From the Madisonian, Washington, Monday, March 17th, 1842.
“The Last Levee of the Season.
“The levee held by the President on Tuesday evening last was a brilliant affair, and gave satisfactory evidenceof the esteem in which that high functionary is held in social circles.
“Among the visitors of peculiar note were the distinguished authors of the ‘Sketch-Book,’ and of the ‘Pickwick Papers,’ in addition to whom almost all the Ministers of Foreign Powers to our Government were in attendance in full court dress.
“The rooms were filled to overflowing with the talent and beauty of the metropolis, whilst Senators and Members of Congress, without distinction of party, served to give interest and to add animation to the scene. It seems to us that these levees, as at present conducted, are peculiarly adapted to the genius of our Republican institutions, inasmuch as all who please may attend without infringement of etiquette. We almost regret their termination for the season, but look forward with pleasure to the period when they will be renewed.”
“I may say that this notice, as restrained as it is, bears internal evidence showing that it would not have been made but for the necessity of informing the public in some indirect manner of the termination of the public receptions for a season. I find none other. In another column, and in quite a different connection, theMadisoniansays: ‘The RichmondWhigadmits, and we heartily concur in the sentiment, that Mr. Tyler, in his appointment of Washington Irving, the author of the ‘Sketch-Book,’ as minister to Spain, has paid a just tribute to the most distinguished ornament of American letters.’ Scarcely any notice appears of the marriage ofmy sister Elizabeth in the preceding January, that being regarded as a purely family matter.”
No perceptible change in Mrs. Tyler’s condition of health occurred until Friday, the 9th day of September, 1842. On the morning of that day, her family physician detected a change unhappily for the worse, and a threatened renewal of paralysis. He instantly called in consultation others of the faculty, and everything devised by the skill of the profession to ward off the fatal stroke was promptly applied. But all in vain. On the evening of the next day, Saturday, September the 10th, at eight o’clock, the hour came for her to be joined to her fathers. A pious communicant of the Church of Christ, innocent in soul as a little child, crowned with the virtues which had marked her useful and unselfish life, fearing and loving God, reverencing her husband, adoring and adored by her children—she passed into the heavenly kingdom palpitating with the immortal joys of a spirit released from every earthly pain and sorrow. On Sunday, the Executive Mansion stood arrayed in mourning, and the tolling of the bells of the city announced the sad visitation to those among the living. Every honor that the sincerest respect and the purest love and the sense of a bitter bereavement could suggest, was paid to her remains. A committee of the citizens of Washington conveyed her body, after it had laid in state in the East Room for several days, to the family burial-ground at the old paternal residence in New Kent county, and there, in the midst of a sorrowingassemblage of relatives and friends and neighbors who had known her from birth, the parting tears of her husband and her children, gushing up from the fountain of their hearts, were shed upon her coffin ere it was deposited in the earth, where reposed already the dust of her parents and of others she had loved, and who fondly loved her.
Thus lived and died Mrs. Letitia Tyler, wife of the last of the Virginia Presidents of the United States, a model of the exalted civilization of the “ancient commonwealth and dominion,” a representative of her sex worthy of their grateful memory, and an honor to the human family.