The old simplicity had given way to elegance and luxury of adornment.

The east room of the presidential mansion was covered with Brussels carpeting.

There were silk curtains at the windows, French mirrors of unusual size, and three splendid English crystal chandeliers.

In the dining-room were a hundred candles and lamps, and silver plate of every description, and presiding over this magnificence the strange successors of Washington and his stately dame, of Madison and his no less elegant wife,--the Tennessee backwoodsman and Peggy O'Neil.
When, it is not too soon to ask, in the general reform of civil service, shall the possibility of such anomalies be entirely removed by restricting the executive mansion to an executive bureau, and entirely separating social ceremony from official state, to the final suppression of back stairs influence and kitchen cabinets?
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