LONDON, PARIS, AND NEW YORK. STANDING in the City Hall, New York, and drawing from that point a circle whose radius shall be three miles, we embrace a population of three-quarters of a million. We say this at the outset, by way of securing respect for our theme. New York is a mere Jonah's gourd or Jack the Giant-killer's beanstalk compared with London. London was London when St. Paul was a prisoner in Rome, ten years before the destruction of Jerusalem. Sixteen hundred years afterwards, when New York was but just named, London lost some seventy thousand inhabitants by the plague, and more than thirteen thousand houses by the Great Fire, and hardly missed them. Before this period, however, the little Dutch town of Niew Amsterdam, called by the aborigines Manahatta, or Manhattan, had commenced a dozing existence, under the government of Walter the Doubter and Peter the Headstrong, celebrated by that great chronicler, Diedrich Knickerbocker. Some consider this a mythic period, and class the legends of Wilhelmus Van Kieft's wisdom, and Peter Stuyvesant's valour, with the stories of Romulus and Remus, and the Horatii and Curiatii. But to cast any doubt upon a historian like Knickerbocker-the Grote of colonial history-at once minute and philosophical, just and enthusiastic is surely unwise. His picture of the portly burghers of Niew Amsterdam, their habits and manners, pursuits, politics, and laws, is verified by the impress left on their descendants. All the foreign floods that have swept over the city have not been able to wash out the footsteps of the original settlers; and Walter the Doubter and Peter the Headstrong still figure, it is said, in the assembly of the City Fathers, though the voluminous nether habiliments, which characterized them of old, have dwindled to the modern pantaloon. Casting our eyes backward for a moment, let us imagine the condition of things before English innovation had interfered with the quiet current of Dutch ideas in the metropolis of the West. "The modern spectator," says our historian, "who wanders through the streets of this populous city, can scarcely form an idea of their appearance in the primitive days of the Doubter. The grass grew quietly in the highways; bleating sheep and frolicsome calves sported about that verdant ridge where now the Broadway loungers take their morning stroll. The cunning fox or ravenous wolf skulked in the woods where now are to be seen the dens of the righteous fraternity of money-brokers. The houses of the higher class were generally constructed of wood, excepting the gable end, which was of small black and yellow Dutch bricks, and always faced the street. The house was always furnished with abundance of large doors and small windows on every floor; the date of its erection was curiously designated by iron figures on the front, and on the top of the roof was perched a fierce little weathercock, to let the family know which way the wind blew. The front door was never opened, except on marriages, funerals, New Year's days, the festival of VOL. XXX. B St. Nicholas, or some such great occasion * A passion for cleanliness was the leading principle in domestic economy. The whole house was constantly in a state of inundation, under the discipline of mops and brooms, and scrubbing-brushes; and the good housewives of that day were a kind of amphibious animal, delighting exceedingly to be dabbling in water; insomuch, that many of them grew to have webbed fingers like a duck. In those happy days a well-regulated family always rose with the dawn, dined at eleven, and went to bed at sundown. Fashionable parties were confined to the higher class, or noblesse; that is to say, such as kept their own cows or drove their own waggons. The company commonly assembled at three o'clock, and went away about six; unless it was winter-time, when the fashionable hours were a little earlier, that the ladies might get home before dark. At these tea-parties the utmost propriety and dignity of deportment prevailed. No flirting or coquetting; no gambling of old ladies, nor chattering and romping of young ones; no self-satisfied strutting of wealthy gentlemen with their brains in their pockets," &c. Speaking further of the ladies, Mr. Knickerbocker says: "Their hair, untortured by the abominations of art, was scrupulously pomatumed back from their foreheads with a candle, and covered with a little cap of quilted calico. Their petticoats of linsey-woolsey, were striped with a variety of gorgeous dyes, and all of their own manufacture. These were the honest days, in which every woman stayed at home, read the Bible and wore pockets, and that too of a goodly size, fashioned with patch-work of many curious devices, and ostentatiously worn on the outside. Every good housewife made the clothes of her husband and family," &c. Such and so homely was the germ of the present goodly town that sits, like a queen, throned between two mighty streams, with a magnificent bay at her feet. Marks of her Dutch origin were numerous a few years since, and are still to be found, though sparely. Of the national customs enumerated and described by the veracious Diedrich, we find at the present day but few. The last of the gable-fronted houses, with curious steps in the brickwork on the sides of the peak, disappeared some years since. Calves never frisk in Broadway now, though they sometimes pass through it tied in carts, in defiance of humanity and decency. The year of building is no longer written in iron on the fronts of the houses, for "Panting Time toils after us in vain," and chronology is out of date. Large doors have now large windows to keep them company, and weather-cocks are rendered unnecessary by the arrival of vessels from some part of the earth with every wind that blows. The front door is now opened to everybody but the master of the house, who goes out of it in the morning not to see it again till evening. The practice of daily inundation is now nearly limited to the street, since Kidderminster, Brussels, and Wilton, conspire to cover every inch of floor; but the annual house-cleaning is still in full vogue, and no amount of slop, discomfort, destruction, and self-sacrifice, is considered too great in the accomplishment of this civic festival. As to rising with the dawn, the citizen of to-day considers breakfast-time daybreak; and the dinner-hour is as various as the fluctuations of business and pleasure. "Fashionable society" has, at present, no very decided limits, as few of the inhabitants keep a cow, and many of the highest pretenders to bon ton do not drive their own waggons-getting home before dark! New York ladies make a point of getting home before light; and if they assemble at three o'clock it is for a dejeûner, or a matinée dansante. As for Mr. Knickerbocker's further characterization of the genteel manners of the olden time, it would be unhandsome in us to pursue our counter-picture; but this we will say, in mere justice, and all joking aside, that there are no gambling ladies in New York, either young or old. Thinking of New York in her early life, we were about to say that from 1614 to 1674 she was a mere shuttlecock between the Dutch and English; but the recollection that neither of the contending parties ever tossed her towards the other, spoiled our figure, and we find her more like the unfortunate baby whom it took all Solomon's wisdom to save from utter destruction between rival mothers. The Dutch certainly had the prior claim; but that circumstance, though something in a case of maternity, seems far from conclusive in the matter of adoption. The little Dutch city had accumulated a thousand inhabitants, and wrenched from the home-government leave to govern itself by the aid of a schout, burgomasters, and schepens, when King Charles II., of pious memory, coolly gave a grant of the entire province to his brother James, Duke of York, who forthwith proved his right (that of the strongest), and put an English governor in place of Peter Stuyvesant, called by Knickerbocker, "a tough, valiant, sturdy, weather-beaten, mettlesome, obstinate, leathern-sided, lion-hearted, generous-spirited, old governor," who nearly burst with rage when obliged to sign the capitulation, and who finished by dying of sheer mortification on hearing that the combined English and French fleets had beaten the Dutch under De Ruyter. Nine years after, the tables were turned, and Dutch rule once more brought in sour-krout and oly-koeks; but, in 1674, New York became English by treaty, and so remained until November, 1783. Since that epoch, although growth and prosperity have been the general rule, yet the island city has had her ups and downs, by means of fire, pestilence, war, embargo, mobs, &c., quite enough to stimulate the energy of her sons and ripen the wisdom of her councils. In 1825 the completion of the Erie Canal, which united the Atlantic with the great lakes, gave a prodigious impulse to trade. In 1832 came the cholera, threatening utter desolation; and in 1835 a fire, which consumed property worth twenty millions of dollars. Yet, in 1842, the Great Aqueduct was finished, at a cost of thirteen million dollars. Thus much premised, let us look at New York of to-day. "She has no time To looken backe, her eyne be fixed before." In describing American towns, if we would make our picture a like ness, we must 66 · Catch, ere she change, the Cynthia of the minute." The New York of 1851 resembles her of fifty years ago scarcely more than the West End of London resembles Birmingham or Bristol. In 1800, one might easily believe the old story, that the streets were originally laid out by the cows, as they went out to pasture and returned at evening. Streets running in all sorts of curves, crossed each other at all conceivable angles, making a maze without a plan, through which strangers needed to drop beans, like the children in the fairy-tale, to avoid being wholly lost. Fortunately, the city is not very wide, so that Broadway, which always ran lengthwise through the centre, has served as a tolerable clue from the beginning. Great sacrifices have been made for the sake of regularity, and there is now a tolerable degree of it, even in the old, or south part of the city, cross streets running from Broadway to either river with an approach to parallelism. In the early time, the town presented no bad resemblance in shape to the phenomenon called a "mackerel sky," Broadway representing the spine, and the streets running to either river the ribs, while northward and southward was a tapering off; on the south, where the Battery juts into the bay, and on the north, where the uppermost houses gradually narrowed till Broadway came to an end, with few buildings on either side of it. But in these later days, when Knickerbocker limits no longer confine the heterogeneous thousands that have pushed the old race from their stools, sixteen great avenues, each a hundred feet wide, run parallel with Broadway and the rivers, cut at right angles by wide streets, lined with costly dwellings, churches, schools, and other edifices. As is usual in great commercial towns, the lowest portion of the population haunt the neighbourhood of the wharfs; and, in New York, the eastern side of the city in particular attracts this class. But, perhaps, no city of the size has fewer streets of squalid poverty, although the encouragement given to immigration is such, that there must necessarily be great numbers of wretched immigrants who have neither the will nor the power to live by honest industry. It is in truth for this class of persons that hospitals and penitentiaries are here built, foreigners supplying at least nine-tenths of the inmates of those institutions, in New York. As to clean and healthy streets, the upper and newer part of the city has, of course, the advantage. It is laid out with special attention to drainage, for which the ridged shape of the ground affords great facility; the island on which New York is built being highest in the middle, and sloping off, east and west, towards the Hudson and East Rivers. Manhattan Island is about fourteen miles long, with an average breadth of one mile and a half, the greatest width being two and a half miles. At the southerly point of the island, where the Hudson unites with the strait called the East River, lies one of the finest harbours in the world, affording anchorage for ships of the largest size, and surrounded by cultivated land and elegant residences. Several fortified islands diversify this bay, and numerous forts occupy the points and headlands on either side. The general appearance of the bay is that of great beauty, of the milder sort. The shores are rather low, but finely wooded, and the approach to the city from the ocean very striking. The battery, a promenade covered with fine old trees, offers a rural front, but the forests of masts stretching far up either river attract the stranger's attention much more forcibly. The coup d'œil is here magnificent. Brooklyn, on Long Island, a large city, whose white columned streets gleam along the heights, giving a palatial grandeur to the view, is just opposite New York, on the south-east, and divided from it by so narrow a strait that it appears more truly to be a part of it than the Surrey side of the Thames to belong to London, although the rush of commerce forbids bridges. On the west side, the banks of the Hudson are lined with towns, an outcrop of the central metropolis. Entering the city from any quarter, we are sure to find ourselves in |