Old Madeira wine has always been very popular in Washington, especially on the tables of their Honors the Justices of the Supreme Court. For many years supplies were obtained from the old mercantile houses in Alexandria, which had made direct importations prior to the Revolution. During the Fillmore Administration many Washington cellars were replenished at the sale of the private stock of wines and liquors of the late Josiah Lee, of Baltimore. Fifty demijohns of various brands of Madeira were sold at prices ranging from twenty- four dollars to forty-nine dollars per gallon; and one lot of twenty- two bottles commanded the extreme price of fifteen dollars and fifty cents per bottle, which at five bottles to the gallon is at the rate of seventy-seven dollars and fifty cents per gallon.
Mr. Brady came from New York and opened a "daguerrean saloon" at Washington, and the dim portraits produced on burnished metal were regarded with silent astonishment. Up to that time the metropolis had been visited every winter by portrait and miniature painters, but their work required long sittings and was expensive. The daguerreotypes, which could be produced in a few moments and at a comparatively small cost, became very popular, and Brady's gallery was thronged every morning with distinguished visitors. Mr. Brady was a man of slight figure, well proportioned, with features somewhat resembling the portraits of Vandyke. He possessed wonderful patience, artistic skill, and a thorough acquaintance with the mechanical and chemical features of sun-painting. For the next thirty years he took portraits of almost all the prominent persons who visited Washington City, and in time his reminiscences of them became very interesting.
The citizens of Washington enjoyed a rare treat when Thackeray came to deliver his lectures on the English essayists, wits, and humorists of the eighteenth century. Accustomed to the spread-eagle style of oratory too prevalent at the Capitol, they were delighted with the pleasing voice and easy manner of the burly, gray-haired, rosy- cheeked Briton, who made no gestures, but stood most of the time with his hands in his pockets, as if he were talking with friends at a cozy fireside. He did not deal, like Cervantes, with the ridiculous extravagance of a fantastic order, nor, like Washington Irving, with the faults and foibles of men, but he struck at the very heart of the social life of his countrymen's ancestors with caustic and relentless satire. Some of the more puritanical objected to the moral tendencies of Thackeray's lectures, and argued that the naughty scapegraces of the British court should not have been thus exhumed for the edification of an American audience.