forth by your own writers and speakers has proved it to have been conducted under circumstances of rapine, spoliation, and atrocity, than which the wars of Attila or Genseric can show nothing more flagitious, and in a spirit worthier of Pagans and Cannibals than of Christian gentlemen.

As for the other things I have grumbled at they are as the shadow of the shadow of smoke. What does it matter now,

if Mrs. Trollope saw a gentleman at the playhouse put his feet up on the ledge of the dress circle, or was shocked at the spectacle of a young lady in Virginia lacing her stays in the presence of a black footman? Mrs. Trollope is dead. We must all die. "You know you must," I quote Jeremy Taylor. Will it matter ten or fifteen years hence if one surly English traveller the more or the less found fault with your hotels or your spittoons, your cuisine or your cock-tails, your quack advertisements or your railway cars, the squaretoed boots of your men, or the false back-hair of your young ladies? Has all that the travellers have said for thirty years prevented New York from numbering in the year 1864 a population of one million of souls? Will ten thousand grumblers prevent your becoming in another half century a nation seventy millions strong? There, let the grumblers be; and the fools who declare you to be " sunk in a hopeless abyss of ruin." You are pretty deep in the mire just now; but you will come out of it some day stronger and better in every way. Did not Dean Swift once invent a factitious proverb: "The more dirt, the less hurt"? May that be your

case.

This is the end of my justification. The rest of the book

must speak for itself. The only merit I claim concerning it is that the things I had to say against the Americans were uttered whilst I was living amongst them-were said to their face and in their teeth, and that I waited until I came home to say that which was favourable of a people of whose many great and noble and generous qualities there cannot be a sincerer admirer than I am-among whom I spent many happy months, and where I have left many of the dearest friends I ever had in my life.

CHAPTER II.

NEW YORK.

DOCTOR MAGINN once began an article on poor Haydon, the painter, in Fraser with these agreeable words, "Come along, donkey, and be cudgelled ;" and he proceeded to cudgel him accordingly. That was the style in the good old days of "slashing writers." Now it is very easy to apostrophise the City of New York with a "Come along, Gotham, and be described," but it is by no means so light a task to describe it.

Consider its size. Have you read Camden? Are you familiar with Stow? Have you taken down one of the volumes of the great Crowle Pennant in the Print Room of the British Museum? Have you Charles Knight's "London on your own library shelves? Are the names of J. T. Smith, and John Timbs and Peter Cunningham, familiar in your mouth as household words? Do you know how many hundreds of articles about London antiquities and London life and London characters there are in that dead-and-gone periodical "Household Words" itself? And Paris! Are there not Mercier and Edmond Texier, and scores of feuilletonistes, satirists, and antiquarians writing, week after week, scores of sketches of Paris, grave or solemn, in scores

of papers big and little ? Pelion has been piled upon Ossa in the way of description of the two great capitals of European civilisation; yet it is felt on all sides that not half the truth has been told-that in both London and Paris there are innumerable inner recesses and penetralia which are still, to most intents and purposes, a terra incognita, and that there are as many thousand denizens of the French and English metropolis, knowing not their right hand from their left, as there were in Nineveh of old.

And why? Because they are so enormous, and their population is so prodigious. A lifetime will not suffice for description when we have to deal with millions. We may take one cluster of streets, a few groups of character, half-adozen phases of life; but we do, at the most, but fringe the huge continent of brick and stone, and, when we are broken and exhausted, are mournfully conscious of the vast outlying districts we have failed to explore. We have been but as topographical Newtons-as children picking up pebbles and shells on the sea-shore while the great ocean of life lay undiscovered around us. "Oh! my Book, my Book!" murmured the dying Buckle at Damascus. Poor fellow, he knew that with all his well-filled, common-place ledgers, with all the noble volumes he had actually put forth, he had but written, as yet, the Preface to the History of Civilisation.

Do not believe that the mania for excess in architecture was destroyed by the confusion of tongues. In most of us who think that we can think there is implanted, inherent and innate, an ambition to set about the building of Babel.

We all want to do the "big thing on Snyder "-to write the Big Book. Some of us are privileged to reach the second or third story, some even rise to the attics. To one or two in a generation is it given to wave a flag from the chimney-pots, and see the end crown the work then they may walk to and fro in their gardens at Lausanne, like Gibbon, chuckling softly and rubbing their hands: then perchance they may regard their accomplished labour as Dom Calmet did his Dictionary of the Bible, and sigh, "I shall never live to correct the errors which are in that work;" these are the fortunate ones-the elect; but how many are destined to faint and falter and die, or ever the foundations are dug or the scaffolding reared?

The British public, to say nothing of my publisher, would be extremely dissatisfied were I to confine this work to a description of the aspect and a commentary on the manners of New York. Yet, give me a thousand pages and I could fill them all—aye, and with smaller type than that which Messrs. Tinsley have allotted me-with variations on this solitary theme. New York, from the Bay; New York from the top of old Trinity church; New York from the Central Park; New York from Brooklyn Heights; the merchants, the bankers, the hack-drivers, the rowdies, the stock-jobbers, the hotel-keepers, the bar-tenders, the corner grocery keepers, the quacks, the photographers, the dandies, the corn-cutters, the editors, the blacklegs, the shoulder-hitters, the "hard cases," the militia colonels, the bounty-jumpers, the crimps, the dry goods drummers, the water-side sharks, the "war widows," the niggers, the miscegenators, the free-lovers, the

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