previous next

[346] ago, with Gener, who was President of the Cortes when the King was deposed, and tells many curious stories of those troubled times.

Our friend Wallenstein left us last week, after a visit of above two months. He is a very uncommon man, of remarkable acquirements.

. . . . I believe he carried off the respect and personal regard of every distinguished man in this quarter of the country. . . . .1


In November, 1824, Mr.Ticknor and Mrs. Ticknor went to Washington, and afterwards, accompanied by Mr. Webster, visited Mr. Madison at Montpellier, and Mr. Jefferson at Monticello. Upon their return they passed some weeks in Washington, mingling in its general society, and seeing, in an easy and familiar way, many of the distinguished men assembled there. In two letters to Mr. Prescott, Mr. Ticknor describes some of the scenes and incidents of this journey.2

To Wm. H. Prescott.

Monticello, December 16, 1824.
Your letter, my dear William, followed us from Washington, and was waiting here day before yesterday, when we arrived. We thank you for it very much, and for all the agreeable intelligence and pleasant talk it contained . . . . We have had an extremely pleasant visit in Virginia thus far, and have been much less annoyed by bad roads and bad inns than we supposed we should be, though both are certainly vile enough. We left Washington just a week ago, and came seventy miles in a steamboat, to Potomac Creek, and afterwards nine miles by land, to Fredericksburg. . . . .

On Saturday morning we reached Mr. Madison's, at Montpellier, on the west side of what is called the Southwest Mountain; a very fine, commanding situation, with the magnificent range of the Blue Ridge stretching along the whole horizon in front, at the distance of from twenty to thirty miles. . . . .

We were received with a good deal of dignity and much cordiality, by Mr.Madison and Mrs. Madison, in the portico, and immediately placed at


1 In a letter of June 11, 1824, Mr. Ticknor speaks of ‘the Baron de Wallenstein, now belonging to the Russian Legation at Washington, a young German of great knowledge.’ The acquaintance had begun in Madrid.

2 An account of this visit to Mr. Jefferson is already well known to those who are familiar with Mr. Webster's Life by Curtis, and his papers published by his son. Some details and repetitions are therefore omitted here.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Places (automatically extracted)
hide People (automatically extracted)
Sort people alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a person to search for him/her in this document.
George Ticknor (4)
Madison (4)
Daniel Webster (2)
William H. Prescott (2)
Thomas Jefferson (2)
Wallenstein (1)
George Ticknor Curtis (1)
hide Dates (automatically extracted)
Sort dates alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a date to search for it in this document.
December 16th, 1824 AD (1)
November, 1824 AD (1)
June 11th, 1824 AD (1)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: