10 March 1856 – 16 March 1856

Mr. ———, our new ambassador, arrived on Thursday afternoon by the Atlantic, and I called at the Adelphi Hotel, after dinner, to pay him my respects. I found him and his family at supper. . . . . They seem to be plain, affable people. . . . . The ambassador is a venerable old gentleman, with a full head of perfectly white hair, looking not unlike an old-fashioned wig; and this, together with his collarless white neckcloth and his brown coat, gave him precisely such an aspect as one would expect in a respectable person of pre-revolutionary days. There was a formal simplicity, too, in his manners, that might have belonged to the same era. He must have been a very handsome man in his youthful days, and is now comely, very erect, moderately tall, not overburdened with flesh; of benign and agreeable address, with a pleasant smile; but his eyes, which are not very large, impressed me as sharp and cold. He did not at all stamp himself upon me as a man of much intellectual or characteristic vigor. I found no such matter in his conversation, nor did I feel it in the indefinable way by which strength always makes itself acknowledged. B———, though, somehow, plain and uncouth, yet vindicates himself as a large man of the world, able, experienced, fit to handle difficult circumstances of life; dignified, too, and able to hold his own in any society. Mr. ——— has a kind of venerable dignity; but yet, if a person could so little respect himself as to insult him, I should say that there was no innate force in Mr. ——— to prevent it. It is very strange that he should have made so considerable a figure in public life, filling offices that the strongest men would have thought worthy of their highest ambition. There must be something shrewd and sly under his apparent simplicity; narrow, cold, selfish, perhaps. I fancied these things in his eyes. He has risen in life by the lack of too powerful qualities, and by a certain tact, which enables him to take advantage of circumstances and opportunities, and avail himself of his unobjectionableness, just at the proper time. I suppose he must be pronounced a humbug, yet almost or quite an innocent one. Yet he is a queer representative to be sent from brawling and boisterous America at such a critical period. It will be funny if England sends him back again, on hearing the news of ———'s dismissal. Mr. ——— gives me the impression of being a very amiable man in his own family. He has brought his son with him, as Secretary of Legation,—a small young man, with a little mustache. It will be a feeble embassy. I called again the next morning, and introduced Mrs. ———, who, I believe, accompanied the ladies about town. This simplicity in Mr. ———'s manner puzzles and teases me; for, in spite of it, there was a sort of self-consciousness, as if he were being looked at,—as if he were having his portrait taken.