At her formal receptions, which Mr. Daniel Huntingdon has represented in his famous picture, Mrs. Washington stood with the Cabinet ladies around her, stately Mrs. Robert Morris by her side, herself the stateliest figure in the group. The President passed from guest to guest, exchanging a word with one and another, and pleasing all by the fine courtesy of his manner. The lovely ladies and the dignified gentlemen, many of the latter with powdered heads and bag-wigs, like his Excellency, trooped up by twos and threes to pay their respects to the first lady in the land. If around the Chief Magistrate were gathered the great men of the nation, those who, like John Adams, Robert Morris, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, had already impressed themselves deeply upon the past, and in connection with such younger minds as those of James Madison, Rufus King, Elbridge Gerry, and Oliver Ellsworth, the Cerberus of the Treasury, were destined to outline the serener history of the future, Mrs. Washington numbered in her Republican Court the noblest and most beautiful women in the land. Among these were many who, like her, had shared with their husbands the anxieties of the Revolutionary period,--notably, Mrs. General Knox, Mrs. Robert Morris, and Mrs. Adams,--while in a younger group were Mrs. Rufus King, who is described as singularly handsome, Mrs. Gerry, Mrs. George Clinton, Mrs. William Smith, John Adams’s daughter, Mrs. Walter Livingston, whom General Washington had once entertained, in rustic style, when encamped near New York, and, not the least attractive among these lovely dames, Mrs. John Jay, a daughter of Governor Livingston, who shared with Mrs. William Bingham, of Philadelphia, the distinction of being called the most beautiful and charming woman in America. Honors seem to have been easy between these two high-born dames, as both were beloved, admired, and _fêted_ at home and abroad. The Marquise de Lafayette, who entertained a warm friendship for Mrs. Jay, said, with charming simplicity, that “Mrs. Jay and she thought alike, that pleasure might be found abroad, but happiness only at home.” All of Mrs. Jay’s portraits represent a face of such exquisite beauty that it is not difficult to imagine the furore she created at foreign and Republican courts.