where all the chief shops and stores are situated; and Fifth Avenue, with the streets running across it, is the fashionable quarter, the resort of the Upper Ten Thousand, the Belgravia of the town. Across the middle of the island stretches the Central Park, and beyond that are large, straggling suburbs, whose streets stand high up in the multiplication table, and which threaten, in a few years, if New York should grow at its present rate, to cover the whole island of Manhattan. Across the Hudson and the East River, which join at the city end of the island, lie the great suburbs of Jersey City and Brooklyn-Birkenheads, so to speak, to the New World Liverpool. So much for the topography of New York.

The general effect of the "Empire City" is to me disappointing. Simple magnitude is never very striking to anyone accustomed to London; and, except in magnitude, there is not much to impress you. Broadway is, or rather ought to be, a very fine street; and its single stores are as grand as anything can be in the way of shop-front architecture. But a marble-faced palace, of six stories high, has a cast-iron store, with card-paper-looking pillars, on one side, and a two-storied red-brick house on the other. There is no symmetry or harmony about the street, so that it lacks grandeur, without having irregularity enough to be picturesque. The rows of stunted trees on either side give it, in parts, a French look; but still, when I had once heard a candid American describe it as a "one-horse boule

yard, I felt he had produced a description which could not be improved upon. Fifth Avenue is symme

trical enough; but its semi-detached stone mansions, handsome as they are, have not sufficient height to justify its American name of the Street of Palaces; while its monotony is dreadful. The other streets of the fashionable quarters are inferior editions of the Fifth Avenue, and suggested to me, just as our own districts of Tyburnia and Belgravia always do, two invariable reflections—firstly, what an enormous amount of wealth there must be in a country where such vast numbers of people can afford to live in such houses; and, secondly, how little artistic taste there must be amongst a people who, with such incomes, are content to live in dwellings of such external unattractiveness. The poorer streets, towards the banks of the island, have no architectural pretensions; and their prototype, the famous Bowery, bears the strongest family resemblance to the Walworth Road or to Mile-end Gate. The churches, with their towers and tall taper steeples, relieve the uniformity of the city; but, like all our modern style of ecclesiastical architecture, they are not vast enough to be imposing. In fact, if you could transpose New York to England, it would be externally as uninteresting a city as Manchester. But here, in this crisp clear air, there is a sort of French sparkle about the place which enlivens it strangely.

With the exception of the climate, there is far less

of a foreign look about New York than I had expected. Statistics tell you that over one-half of the population of the city was born in the Old World; and it is also true, that there are only three German cities in the world-Vienna, Berlin, and, I believe, Hamburgh— which contain more German inhabitants than New York. But, somehow or other, the stout English kine seem to have swallowed up so completely the lean foreign kine, that there is little trace left outwardly of their existence. All the shop-notices, and all the thousands of placards, which are stuck upon every wall, with an utterly English disregard of artistic proprieties, are in English, and addressed to English customers. Announcements in the shop-windows that, "Ici on parle Français," and "Hier spricht man Deutsch," are but few; while the number of persons you meet speaking any language but English is smaller, I should say, than in London or in Liverpool. There are quarters in the town which Irish, French, and Germans more especially frequent; but Ratcliffe Highway is as much Irish, Whitechapel is as much German, and Leicester Square is as much French, as any corresponding district in New York. The German population evidently retains the strongest individuality of any foreign class; and the fancy for bright inharmonious colours, so common here amongst the women of the lower classes, coupled with the custom of wearing knitted woollen caps, instead of bonnets, gives rather a German look to the people

in the poorer streets. There is a German newspaper too; and two or three German theatres, which the Germans have tried unsuccessfully to obtain leave to open on the Sunday. Indeed, the dulness of New York on Sunday is so pre-eminently British, that it is hard to persuade oneself one is not in London or Glasgow.

The physiognomy of the population is not English ; but it is very difficult to state why, or in what respect, it is not so. The difference I take to be chiefly, that instead of the twenty varieties of form and feature you observe in an English crowd, one English type of face, and one only, the sallow, sharp-featured, straighthaired one, is reproduced indefinitely. An American friend of mine, who, I must add, is a firm follower of Mr. Buckle, has a theory, that the Red Indian is the type of face created by Nature for America; and that there is an irresistible tendency in each succeeding generation of Americans to approximate more and more to the natural Red Indian type. I give no opinion as to the value of the theory; but it is certainly a curious fact, how, in spite of the constant infusion of fresh foreign blood, one uniform type of face appears to be spreading itself through the American people. The coloured population in New York is not numerous enough in the streets, to give a foreign air to the crowd, as it forms little over one per cent. of the whole. At the hotels, and in wealthy private houses, the servants are frequently black, but in the streets

there are few negroes visible. Here, as elsewhere, they form a race apart, never walking in company with white persons, except as servants.

There is a popular delusion in England, that New York is a sort of gingerbread-and-gilt city; and that, contrasted with an English town, there is a want of solidity about the whole place, materially as well as morally. On the contrary, I was never in a town where externally, at any rate, show was so much sacrificed to solid comfort. The ferries, the cars, the street railroads, and the houses, are all so arranged as to give one substantial comfort, without external decoration. It is, indeed, indoors that the charm of New York is found. There is not much of luxury, in the French sense of the word no lavish display of mirrors, and clocks, and pictures-but there is more comfort, more English luxury, about the private dwelling-houses than I ever saw in the same class of houses at home. The rooms are so light and lofty; the passages are so well warmed; the doors slide backwards in their grooves, so easily and yet so tightly; the chairs are so luxurious; the beds are so elastic, and the linen so clean, and, let me add, the living so excellent, that I would never wish for better quarters, or for a more hospitable welcome, than I have found in many private houses of New York. All the domestic arrangements (to use a fine word for gas, hot water, and other comforts) are wonderfully perfect. Everything, even more than