"Why, George Prince Regent, of course. And his extraordinary courtesy fully justifies his sponsors in baptism for having given him the name."
The lady lost no time in telling everybody of the interesting fact--and the novelist became "Prince Regent James" to all his Richmond friends from that hour forth.
John R. Thompson was the editor of the _Southern Literary Messenger_. Scholar, poet, and man of most gentle mind, it is not surprising that in later years, when the old life was war-wrecked, Mr. William Cullen Bryant made him his intimate friend and appointed him to the office of literary editor of the _Evening Post_, which Mr. Bryant always held to be the supreme distinction possible to an American man of letters. I being scarcely more than a boy studying law in the late fifties, knew him only slightly, but my impression of him at that time was, that with very good gifts and a certain charm of literary manner, he was not yet fully grown up in mind. He sought to model himself, I think, upon his impressions of N. P. Willis, and his aspiration to be recognized as a brilliant man of society was quite as marked as his literary ambition. He was sensitive to slights and quite morbidly apprehensive that those about him might think the less of him because his father was a hatter. Socially at that time and in that country men in trade of any kind were regarded as rather inferior to those of the planter class.
When I knew Thompson better in after years in New York he had outgrown that sort of nonsense, and was a far more agreeable companion because of the fact.
Chief among the literary men of Richmond was John Esten Cooke. His novel "The Virginia Comedians" had made him famous in his native state, and about the time I write of--1858-9--he supplemented it with another story of like kind, "Henry St. John, Gentleman." As I remember them these were rather immature creations, depending more upon a certain grace of manner for their attractiveness than upon any more substantial merit. Certainly they did not compare in vigor or originality with "Surrey of Eagle's Nest" or any other of the novels their author wrote after his mind had been matured by strenuous war experience. But at the time of which I write they gave him a literary status such as no other Virginian of the time could boast, and for a living he wrote ceaselessly for magazines and the like.