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Men and Manners in America One Hundred Years Ago
Men and Manners in America One Hundred Years Ago Author:Horace Elisha Scudder Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PENNSYLVANIA. A Philadelphia Schoolmaster. j]HE materials are abundant for obtaining a view of the social condition of what was at the time the foremost ci... more »ty in America, and from these materials we propose to draw in presenting a picture of manners and customs ; but first we put ourselves under the personal lead of a very agreeable gentleman, Alexander Graydon, Esq., whose reminiscences extend back to a period shortly before the beginning of the war, at which time he was about twenty years of age. His more distinct recollections begin with the removal of his family from Bristol, Penn., to Philadelphia, when he was six or seven years old.] In the city, I lived with, and was under the care of, my grandfather. The school he first put me to was that of David James Dove, an Englishman, and much celebrated in his day as a teacher, and no less as a dealer in the minor kind of satirical poetry. To him were attributed some political effusions in this way, which were thought highly of by his party, and made a good deal of noise. He had also made some figure, it seems, in the Old World; being spoken of, as I have heard (though in what way I know not, having never seen the work), in a book entitled " The Life and Adventures of the Chevalier Taylor." As the story went, some one reading this performance to Mr. Dove on its first appearance, with the mischievous design of amusing himself at his expense, as he knew what the book contained, he (Dove) bore testimony tothe truth of the contents, with which, he said, he was perfectly acquainted, exclaiming as the reader went along, " True, true as the gospel!" But when the part was reached in which he himself is introduced in a situation somewhat ridiculous, he cried out it was a lie, a most abominable lie, and that there was not a syllable o...« less