Similar tributes were paid the newspaper by a remarkable array of public men. In 1840 James K. Paulding wrote from Washington to console it for defeat in the Presidential election: “The manner in which the _Evening Post_ is conducted, its stern and sober dignity, and its freedom from the base fury and still baser falsehoods, with which so many newspapers are debauched and disgraced, makes me proud to remember that I have a humble claim to be associated with its honors.” Sumner was constant in his praise in the fifties. Judge William Kent, son of the great Chancellor, not merely thought it the best American daily, but in 1857 proposed that he purchase a share in it and become one of the editors, a proposal which Isaac Henderson discouraged. William Jay in 1862 wrote Bryant, paying tribute to its “powerful and beneficial influence.” Charles Eliot Norton begged the following year “to express my hearty sympathy with the principles maintained by the _Evening Post_ at this time, and my admiration for the ability with which they are sustained.” A little later Lowell wrote Bryant that he was a subscriber. “I am particularly pleased with the course of the _Evening Post_ on reconstruction. Firmness equally tempered with good feeling is what we want--not generosity with twitches of firmness now and then.” W. H. Furness, the noted Philadelphia minister, sent another unsolicited tribute in the heat of the war, saying that he valued the _Tribune_, but was particularly grateful for the sound, calm vision of the _Evening Post_, and that “it stands in my esteem at the head of the American press. It is cheering that there is abroad such an educator of the public mind.” Caleb Cushing wrote (1868): You may regard it as quite superfluous for me to speak in commendation of the _Evening Post_; but inasmuch as, at one period, I had reason to think and to assert that its language was occasionally overharsh to me, I desire to say, for my own satisfaction, not yours, with how great instruction and pleasure at present I read it every day, and with what daily increasing estimation of its superior dignity, fairness, wisdom, and truth. Even abroad the paper was well known. Bigelow informed Bryant in 1864 that an Englishman had told him he thought it the best newspaper in the world. John Stuart Mill wrote Parke Godwin the following year that he was a regular reader of it through the kindness of Frederick Barnard, later President of Columbia, who thought it the best American daily, and that he had formed a high opinion of it.