“America does not forget the romantic forthcoming of the most generous, consistent, and heroic of the knights of the old world to the rescue of the new. She has always dwelt delighted on the constancy of the nobleman who could renounce titles and wealth for more historical and philanthropic honors; the commander renouncing power, who never shed a drop of blood for conquest or vainglory. She has often trembled, but never blushed, for her oriental champion, when tried by the alternate caresses and rage of the most terrific mobs, and imposing monarchs. She knows that his hospitable mansion was the shrine at which her citizens in France consecrated their faith in independence. Invited to revisit the scenes of his first eminence, the very idolatry of welcome abounds with redeeming characteristics of self-government.... They raise him before the world as its image, and bear him through illuminated cities and widely-cultivated regions, all redolent with festivity and every device of hospitality and entertainment, where, when their independence was declared, there was little else than wilderness and war.” Could tongue or pen say more? An old Philadelphia lady, who, in her youth, had the honor of walking to church with Lafayette, vividly recalls her keen disappointment when she first saw him,--short and stout, not by any means the typical hero of her romantic dreams. His son, George Washington Lafayette, was with him, and at a dinner given him, when called upon to respond to a toast, arose, and, struggling with his emotion and his feeble command of English, placed his hand upon his heart, and said, “I am zo happy to be ze son of my fadder!”--words which so touched the sympathetic chord in the hearts of all present that they felt that the entire vocabulary of the language could have furnished him with no more fitting phrase.