It was inevitable that in a little city of twenty thousand, consisting in part of the cleverest men and women in the Republic, and devoted wholly to politics and society, celebrated sojourners should be fêted and lionized. Foreigners visiting America in the Thirties, and recording their impressions, have all paid tribute to the hospitality and brilliance of the capital, as compared with other and larger cities. The most famous of the visitors was Harriet Martineau, who arrived in the summer of 1834, in her thirty-second year, and in the full flush of her literary fame. Introduced to the President and the Senate leaders by the British Minister, it was the rumor at the time that six hundred people called upon her the day after her arrival.[56] “The drollest part of the whole,” wrote a lady of fashion, “is that these crowds, at least in Washington, go to see the lion and nothing else. I have not met with an individual, except Mrs. Seaton and her mother,[57] who have read any of her works, or know for what she is celebrated. Our most fashionable exclusive,[58] Mrs. Tayloe, said she intended to call, and asked what were the novels she had written, and if they were pretty. The gentlemen laugh at a woman’s writing on political economy. Not one of them has the least idea of her work.”[59] But the fluency of the lioness captivated the men. Among her constant visitors were Webster, Clay, Calhoun, Preston, and Justice Story. When she entered the Senate Chamber or the Supreme Court room, the leading men of the Nation left their seats to pay her homage. Calhoun’s “mess” gave her a dinner. Clay insisted that at Lexington she should occupy his house at Ashland, and that she should be the guest of his daughter in New Orleans. Calhoun assured her triumph in Charleston through letters to his friends. “No stranger except Lafayette ever received such universal and marked testimonies of regard,” wrote a sympathetic observer of her reception.[60] When Thomas Hamilton, the English writer, author of “Men and Manners in America,” reached Washington, a member of Congress escorted him, uninvited, to a ball on the evening of his arrival, with the assurance that the “intrusion would be welcome.” After passing “through a formidable array of introductions to distinguished persons, and after four hours of almost unbroken conversation, much of which could not be carried on without considerable expenditure of thought,” the weary tourist, at three o’clock in the morning, rejoiced to find himself “stretched in a comfortable bed at Gadsby’s.”[61] The experiences of Hamilton and Miss Martineau were not exceptional.