olders at Washington, whose
ancestors had been appointed under Federal rule, but who had managed
to veer around into Jackson Democracy. Mr. Webster, in speaking
one day of a Philadelphia family which had thus kept in place, said
that they reminded him of Simeon Alleyn, Vicar of Bray, in Old
England, who steered his bark safely through four conflicting
successive reigns. A bland gentleman, he was first a Papist, then
a Protestant, next a Papist, and lastly a Protestant again. "He
must have been at times," said Mr. Webster, "terribly confused
between gowns and robes, and," continued the Senator, "I can fancy
him listening at his window to the ballad written on him, as trolled
forth by some graceless varlets:

"'To teach my flock I never missed;
Kings were by God appointed,
And they are damned who dare resist
Or touch the Lord's anointed;
And this in law I will maintain
Until my dying day, sir,
That whosoever king shall reign,
I'll be the Vicar of Bray, sir.'"

Mr. Webster was not only fond of repeating quotations from the old
English poets, but also verses from the old Sternhold and Hopkins
hymn-book, which he had studied in the Salisbury meeting-house when
a boy, and sometimes when alone he would sing, or rather chant,
them in his deep voice, without a particle of melody. His favorite
verses were the following translation of the xviiith Psalm:

"The Lord descended from above,
And bow'd the heavens high;
And underneath His feet He cast
The darkness of the sky.

"On cherubs and on cherubims
Full royally He rode,
And on the wings of all the winds
Came flying all abroad."

Late in the Jackson Administration, Richard H. Bayard came to
Washington as a Senator from Delaware, to fill a vacancy caused by
the resignation of Arnold Naudain. He was the son of James Asheton
Bayard, originally a stanch Federalist, who had followed his father-
in-law, Richard Bassett, as a Senator from Delaware, and whose vote
had made Thomas Jefferson President of the United States instead
of Aaron Burr. He had afterward been one of the Commission which
negotiated the treaty of Ghent, and he educated his sons to succeed
him in the Senate, and in turn to qualify a grandson to represent
his State in the upper branch of the National Council. No one
family has furnished so many United States Senators, and they have
all been inspired by the knightly courtesy of the Bayard of the
olden