Mrs. Madison was not the last President’s wife whom the dangers of war exalted to heroism. Yet, with a few exceptions, she has been followed by a line of ladies of average gifts and graces, whose domestic virtues and negative characters are seen but dimly through the reflected glory of their President husbands’ administrations. The faint outline which we catch of Mrs. Monroe is that of a serene and aristocratic woman, too well bred ever to be visibly moved by anything—at least in public. She was Elizabeth Kortright, of New York—an ex-British officer’s daughter, a _belle_ who was ridiculed by her gay friends for having refused more brilliant adorers to accept a plain member of Congress. During Mr. Monroe’s ministry to Paris, she was called “_la belle Americaine_,” and entertained the most stately society of the old _régime_ with great elegance. The only individual act which has survived her career, as the wife of the American minister to France, is her visit to Madame Lafayette in prison. The indignities heaped on this grand and truly great woman, were hard to be borne by an American, to whom the very name of Lafayette was endeared. The carriage of the American minister appeared at the jail. Mrs. Monroe was at last conducted to the cell of the emaciated prisoner. The Marchioness, beholding the stranger sister woman, sank at her feet, too weak to utter her joy. That very afternoon she was to have been beheaded. Instead of the messenger commanding her to prepare for the guillotine, she beheld a woman and a friend! From the first moment of its existence the American Republic had _prestige_ in France. The visit of the American ambassadress changed the minds of the blood-thirsty tyrants. Madame Lafayette was liberated the next morning,—she gladly accepted her own freedom, that she might go and share the dungeon of her husband. The same quiet splendor of spirit and bearing reigned through Mrs. Monroe in the unfinished “White House.” Mrs. Madison maintained the courtly forms copied from foreign courts—but the richness of her temperament and the warmth of her heart pervaded all the atmosphere around her with a genial glow. Mrs. Monroe mingled very little in the society of Washington, and secluded herself from the public gaze, except when the duties of her position compelled her to appear. Her love was for silence, obscurity, peace, not for bustle, confusion, or glare. Yet, even in her courtly reign, “the dear people” were many and strong enough to arise and push on to their rights in the “people’s house.” James Fennimore Cooper has left on record a letter describing a state dinner and _levée_, during Mr. Monroe’s time, and any one who has survived a latter-day jam at the President’s house, will say it was precisely what a Presidential reception was in the stately Monroe day. Says Mr. Cooper: