Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Walcott Boynton, Reader's History of American Literature

[82] Mr. Jefferson in an old two-story house in that street, unbending himself in the society of the learned and polite from the labors of the bureau. And there was Talleyrand, whom I used to meet at the houses of General Hamilton and of Noah Webster, with his club-foot and passionless immovable countenance, sarcastic and malicious even in his intercourse with children. He was disposed to amuse himself with gallantry too; but who does not know, or rather, who ever did know Talleyrand?--About the same time I met with Priestley — grave and placid in his manners, with a slight difficulty of utterance — dry, polite, learned and instructive in his conversation. At a period somewhat later, I saw here the deputy Billaud de Marennes, who had swayed the blood-thirsty mob of the Faubourg St. Antoine, turned the torrent of the multitude into the Hall of the Legislative Assembly, and reanimated France to a bolder and more vigorous resistance against her foreign enemies. I visited him in the garret of a poor tavern in the upper part of William Street, where he lived in obscurity. But why particularize further? We have had savants, litterateurs, and politicians by the score, all men of note, some good and some bad — and most of whom certainly thought that they attracted more attention than they did — Volney and Cobbett and Tom Moore, and the two Michaux, and the Abbe Correa, and Jeffrey, and others: the muster roll of whose names I might call over, if I had the memory of Baron Trenck, and my readers the taste of a catalogue-making librarian. Have we not jostled ex-kings and ex-empresses and ex-nobles in Broadway; trod on the toes of exotic naturalists, Waterloo marshals, and great foreign academicians, at the parties of young ladies; and seen