Alexandria Gazette

Col. Benton makes sundry corrections in the report of a speech of his, lately delivered; and amongst these corrections is the following:--"There is also an error of commission in attributing to me the phrase lady when turning to the fair and graceful mothers and daughters who sat behind us, I gave the Bible opinion of their blessing to the fathers, exemplified in the case of Job's daughters-- fair young women none fairer in all the land --and the only part of all God's compensation to him for his faith and patience, under all his miseries, of which any description was given, thereby showing that these daughters were the main part of the blessing, they alone outweighing the seven sons. I did not say ladies, that word is not in the Bible, nor is it in any Greek or Roman book; and if I must give food for a paragraph on "egotism" in some newspaper in which the editor may not yet have acquired the right to print the pronoun ego before any act of his own, I will add, that phrase is not in the Thirty Years View in any part of the author's own writing. He took a dislike to it in reading of the "ladies" of the Court of the English Charles the Second, so well classified by the sly old Pepys in his Diary, when he says the King and the Court ladies were there, and Madame Bennet and her ladies were there. Since then I eschew the word, and like the answer of the Scotch gardener to the dame who, to enforce some preposterous order told him she was the bishop's lady, to whom the gardener belonged: "Madame, I do not care if you were his wife." To be serious, the phrase has been and is so applied in our America, as to have lost the sense in which it was used in the country from which we take it --madame--first only applicable to the eldest daughter of the King, in France, and afterwards transferred to the dames of the Court."