supporters, just as the absurd Tichborne
Claimant found supporters. But Butler's right to "Nothing to Wear" was
fully substantiated. Horace Greeley made the controversy the subject of
a vigorous editorial in the "Tribune," and "Harper's Weekly," in which
the poem had originally appeared, pointed out that although the verses
were published in February, the spurious claim was not put forward until
July. Writing of "Nothing to Wear" forty years later, W.D. Howells said:

"For the student of our literature 'Nothing to Wear' has the
interest and value of satire in which our society life came to
its full consciousness for the first time. To be sure there
had been the studies of New York called 'The Potiphar Papers,'
in which Curtis had painted the foolish and unlovely face of
our fashionable life, but with always an eye on other methods
and other models; and 'Nothing to Wear' came with the
authority and the appeal of something quite indigenous in
matter and manner. It came winged, and equipped to fly wide
and to fly far, as only verse can, with a message for the
grand-children of 'Flora McFlimsey,' which it delivers today
in perfectly intelligible terms.

"It does not indeed find her posterity in Madison Square. That
quarter has long since been delivered over to hotels and
shops and offices, and the fashion that once abode there has
fled to upper Fifth Avenue, to the discordant variety of
handsome residences which overlook the Park. But it finds her
descendants quite one with her in spirit, and as little
clothed to their lasting satisfaction."

The nuptials that Edmund Clarence Stedman satirized in "The Diamond
Wedding" united Miss Frances Amelia Bartlett and the Marquis Don Estaban
de Santa Cruz de Oviedo, and were held in October, 1859, under the
direction of "the fat and famous Brown, Sexton of Grace Church." Miss
Bartlett, a tall and willowy blonde, still in her teens, was the
daughter of a retired lieutenant in the United States Navy. The Bartlett
home was in West Fourteenth Street, a few doors from the Avenue. The
groom, many years the bride's senior, and of strikingly unprepossessing
appearance, was a Cuban of great wealth. The wedding was the talk of the
town, and Stedman, then a young man of twenty-six, satirized the
ill-mating in a poem that appeared first in the New York "Tribune." The
poem began:

"I need not te