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."