Watson Webb, of the "Courier and Enquirer," or Colonel Stone, of the
"Commercial." Can't you see those grim figures of an old world strutting
down Broadway, glaring about belligerently and suspiciously? Almost
every editor of that period had a theatre feud at one day or another. On
the luckless mummer who had incurred his displeasure he poured out the
vials of his wrath. He incited audiences to riot. Against his brother
editors he hurled such epithets as "loathsome and leprous slanderer and
libeller," "pestilential scoundrel," "polluted wretch," "foul jaws,"
"common bandit," "prince of darkness," "turkey buzzard," "ghoul."
Somehow, in thinking of the old days, I find it hard to reconcile those
men and women who lived under the Knickerbocker sway with their
newspapers. It is pleasanter to dwell upon the old customs, to picture
Mr. Manhattan leaving the scurrilous sheet behind him when he departed
from his store or counting house, and repairing with clean hands to the
wife of his bosom and his family, somewhere in Greenwich Village, or
Richmond Hill, or Bond Street, or the beginnings of Fifth Avenue.

But to revert to the manners of the old town. First of all there was the
business of getting married. It was with an idea of permanency then, and
the Knickerbocker wedding was, in consequence, a ceremony. To it, the
groom, his best-man, and the ushers went attired in blue coats, brass
buttons, high white satin stocks, ruffled-bosomed shirts, figured satin
waistcoats, silk stockings, and pumps. The New Yorker's tailor, if his
pretensions to fashion were well-founded, was Elmendorf, or Brundage, or
Wheeler, or Tryon and Derby; his hatter, St. John, and his bootmakers,
Kimball and Rogers. For the wedding ceremony, the man's hair was tightly
frizzed by Maniort, the leading hair-dresser of the day. He was the
proprietor of the Knickerbocker Barber-Shop at Broadway and Wall Street,
and the town gossip. Years later he was to enjoy the patronage of the
Third Napoleon in Paris as a reward for favours extended to the Prince