[1] His father, Gen. Nathan Burr Graham, belonged to a prominent New York family, and his mother, Marie Antoinette McCoskry, came of good old Scotch stock.
On account of his precocious literary skill he was selected to deliver a poetical address of welcome to Alphonse de Lamartine, when that statesman visited the school in 1848.
[2] During his sojourn abroad he became a proficient French scholar, and retained all his life his fluency and perfect accent, so rare to any foreigner, and was often mistaken for a Frenchman.
He and one of the younger Aspinwalls were the only passengers in the cabin; but the ship carried many emigrants; and when it was wrecked, the passengers were picked up by different sailing vessels, and carried off to various ports; so that many weeks elapsed after the loss of the ship was reported before Lorrie appeared once more at his father's home in New York, emaciated from illness, starvation and exposure, and having saved nothing but the clothes on his back, and one opal stud.
When the capital was transferred to Rome, Graham remained behind, preferring to accept the simple position of Consul rather than change his Italian home.
[3] He was friends with painters and sculptors: John Frederick Kensett, Frederic Edwin Church, Régis François Gignoux, Emanuel Leutze, John Cranch and Christopher Pearse Cranch, Eastman Johnson, William Holman Hunt, Hiram Powers, George Henry Boughton, F. O. C. Darley, Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Couture, George Henry Yewell, Thomas Ball, Jervis McEntee, Launt Thompson; writers in prose and verse: Bayard Taylor, Richard Monckton Milnes, 1st Baron Houghton, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Charles Astor Bristed, George Perkins Marsh, Robert Browning, Anthony Trollope, Richard Henry Stoddard, Elizabeth Stoddard, Edmund Clarence Stedman, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Adelaide Anne Procter, Thomas Buchanan Read, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry James, Alexander Wheelock Thayer; actors, statesmen and men of affairs: John Lorimer Worden, George B. McClellan, Cardinal John McCloskey, Charlotte Cushman, and Edwin Booth.