The tourist in the Washington of the Thirties did not have the opportunity for sight-seeing that means so much to the capital visitor of to-day. Aside from the Capitol and the White House, there were no public buildings of architectural distinction. The churches had “nothing about them to attract attention,” and while St. John’s on Lafayette Square was then summoning to worship, it did not at that time have the virtue of quaintness or the mellowness of historical memories. A visit to the Patent Office was customarily made, and most tourists found something to interest them in the museum of the State Department, with its portraits of the Indian chiefs who had visited Washington.[32] Occasionally the venturesome would ascend to the skylight of the Capitol to survey the straggling and dreary town from the height.[33] But always there was the dignified and stately white building of the lawmakers and of the Supreme Court, and thither tourists and citizens, men and women, daily found their way for the entertainment that never failed. Surrounded by its terraces, its well-kept lawns, its profusion of shrubbery, the visitor reached the entrance over its “beautifully gravelled walks,”[34] and entered the rotunda with its four Trumbull paintings of Revolutionary scenes, to be more impressed with the vacant spaces for four more, and the explanation that “Congress cannot decide on what artist to confer the honor.”[35] He would not fail to be delighted with the classic little Senate Chamber, redolent of the genius of Latrobe, and with the ease with which he might ignore the tiny gallery to find a hearty welcome on the floor. If a foreigner, he would be surprised to find a constant stream of fashionable ladies entering the chamber, crowding the Senators, accepting their seats, and attracting attention with their “waving plumes glittering with all the colors of the rainbow, and causing no little bustle.”[36] There he would see Van Buren or Calhoun in the chair, and on the floor he would want to have Webster, Clay, Benton, Forsyth, Preston, and Ewing pointed out. And perhaps, like Miss Martineau, he would leave with the impression that he had “seen no assembly of chosen men and no company of the high born, invested with the antique dignities of an antique realm, half so imposing to the imagination as this collection of stout-souled, full-grown, original men brought together on the ground of their supposed sufficiency, to work out the will of their diverse constituencies.”[37]