Another interesting Kentuckian of this period was John Thompson Gray.
He was a Harvard man—a wit, a scholar, and, according to old Southern
standards, a chevalier. Handsome and gifted, he had the disastrous
misfortune just after leaving college to kill his friend in a duel—a
mortal affair growing, as was usual in those days, out of a trivial
cause—and this not only saddened his life, but, in its ambitious aims,
shadowed and defeated it. His university comrades had fully counted on
his making a great career. Being a man of fortune, he was able to live
like a gentleman without public preferment, and this he did, except to
his familiars aloof and sensitive to the last.
William Preston, the whilom Minister to Spain and Confederate General,
and David Yandell, the eminent surgeon, were his devoted friends, and a
notable trio they made. Stoddard Johnston, Boyd Winchester and I—very
much younger men—sat at their feet and immensely enjoyed their
brilliant conversation.
Dr. Yandell was not only as proclaimed by Dr. Gross and Dr. Sayre the
ablest surgeon of his day, but he was also a gentleman of varied
experience and great social distinction. He had studied long in Paris
and was the pal of John Howard Payne, the familiar friend of Lamartine,
Dumas and Lemaître. He knew Béranger, Hugo and Balzac. It would be hard
to find three Kentuckians less provincial, more unaffected, scintillant
and worldly wise than he and William Preston and John Thompson Gray.
Indeed the list of my acquaintances—many of them intimates—some of them
friends—would be, if recounted, a long one, not mentioning the
foreigners, embracing a diverse company all the way from Chunkey Towles
to Grover Cleveland, from Wake Holman to John Pierpont Morgan, from
John Chamberlin to Thomas Edison. I once served as honorary pall-bearer
to a professional gambler who was given a public funeral; a man who had
been a gallant Confederate soldier; whom nature intended for an artist,
and circumstance diverted into a sport; but who retained to the last
the poetic fancy and the spirit of the gallant, leaving behind him,
when he died, like a veritable cavalier, chiefly debts and friends. He
was not a bad sort in business, as the English say, nor in
conviviality. But in fighting he was “a dandy.” The goody-goody
philosophy of the namby-pamby takes an extreme and unreal view of life.
It flies to extremes. There are middle men. Travers used to describe
one of these, whom he did not wish particularly to emphasize, as “a
fairly clever son-of-a-gun.”