At once it made them sit up and filled them with a sense of their own sanctity.
According to the same ingenuous chronicler, the most famous figure in the social life of the New York of the sixties, the later Petronius, or the forerunner of Mr.Ward McAllister, was Brown, the sexton of Grace Church, which, for many years, had been the fashionable centre.
"Arrogant old Isaac Brown," Mrs.Burton Harrison called him in her "Recollections, Grave and Gay," "the portly sexton who transmitted invitations for the elect, protested to one of his patronesses that he really could not undertake to 'run society' beyond Fiftieth Street.

To be married or buried within Grace Church's walls was considered the height of felicity.

It was Brown who passed on worthiness in life or death.

He arranged the parties, engineered the bridals, conducted the funerals.

The Lenten season is a horribly dull season, but we manage to make our funerals as entertaining as possible"-- Brown said, according to the quoted story.