Observe, first of all, that the value of labour-and to that extent the dignity of manhood-is palpable even here, amidst the display of the insignia of wealth and luxury; and note how the democratic absence of exclusiveness and the remains of republican simplicity are placed in evidence side by side with the display of European habits, and the intimate absorption of all that is newest and most costly in European invention. A large majority of the carriages are occupied by the owner and his wife or friend only, without either coachman or footman in attendance. Light phaetons, buggies, and trotting-wagons fly past in rapid succession, drawn by horses whose value, estimated chiefly by their speed, will vary from fifty pounds up to a thousand, or even three, four, and five thousand pounds. The possession of fast-trotting horses is a great source of gratification to a large class of Americans, and horses that can do their mile in 2.40 minutes or less fetch a price which would startle an English milord or a French gandin. In none of the light wagons, tilburies, phaetons, curricles, or other light carriages, of which there is an infinite variety, is any servant seated. In the heavier barouches and chariots, of which there are very many splendidly appointed, and lined with costly and delicate-coloured silks, recline ladies dressed in the latest Paris fashions, and whose attire is as tastefully selected and well-harmonised in colour as it is luxurious in texture and evanescent in hue. The most fashionable milliners of Paris, the best tailors of London, contribute regularly their skill and labour to the personal decoration of the habitués of the Central-park. But only the coachman occupies the box. Heraldry is scorned, plush is rejected, and liveries are for the most part restricted within limits of extreme sobriety. It is beneath the dignity of man to be carried about in a menial position on a carriage, where he serves no purpose, and footmen are scarcely or not at all to be seen on American equipages. The millionaire displays his wealth in his carriage and his horses, and not in his men. Four-horse teams are numerous and well-appointed; they are more often attached to a high barouche than to a drag. Mingled with the most richly finished equipages are the humbler buggies of the small tradesman, the fast-looking trotting-wagon of the notorious sport,'* and the lumbering hack which is hired by the hour by a party of Germans or Irish, mechanics with their families out for a holiday, or provincial folk. These may be seen looking around them with undisguised self-satisfaction and triumph at the spectacle of the wealth and greatness of New York, in which they all take a sort of personal pride. In their huge soft hats, rough tweeds, or linen dust-coats (Americanicè dusters), they feel as much at home and as fully lords of the place as the greatest of the crowd; they know, and they glory in the knowledge, that it is all the growth of yesterday; that the roughest wood-splitter or the least successful * A sort of small seat raised on four high spider wheels.

tailor of them all may claim kin with President Grant ex-tanner, with Lincoln ex-rail-splitter, or with Johnson ex-tailor; before each of them lies a distant vista of possible prosperity, which shall give him an equality of station, of influence, or of wealth, with the proudest and most brilliant of the throng; and this consciousness, with the inevitable reflection of how much the scene would astonish the people of the old country if they could all be present, underlies the feeling of independence, and prompts the characteristic bearing of the poorest Roman of them all.

In the history of the throng that passes there is ample food to justify such reflection. The tall, gray-haired, noble-looking man who dashes past, drawn by two fast trotters which could not be bought for five thousand pounds, whose fine grave countenance and intellectual-looking head are familiarised by a hundred photographs and engravings, and whose name and story is a household word in America, began life as a ferryman in the port of New York. Rough in speech, illiterate as few Americans now are, the hero of a score of great struggles in the railway world, the controller of great lines of road, the railway king of New York, and the architect of a fortune estimated at ten millions sterling-he is a favourite type of the kind of success which the average American has constantly before his eyes. Shortly passes a small wrinkled old man, Daniel Drew; a millionaire of almost as large resources, originally a cattle-drover, now a great stock operator, and controlling vast sums of ready-money, revered by many shining lights in the religious world, a founder of religious seminaries and colleges, a liberal donor to churches, shrewd, homely, and caustic in speech, much feared by men of business, a self-made man, and such as only this country produces. More rarely will be seen the tall spare figure, and keen, intelligent, but severe face of the great dry-goods' merchant, whose marble palace towers above all others on Fifth-avenue, whose colossal stores are the pride and boast of Broadway-one of the few objects of interest which Prince Arthur inspected on his recent visit to New York— whose political influence mainly contributed to the election of President Grant. The steps in his career afford a theme on which the New Yorker loves to dwell. Born of humble Irish parentage, mainly self-educated, first a school-teacher, then a small shopkeeper, without friends, family, fortune, or connection to aid him, he has gradually built-up a business of unrivalled magnitude, and accumulated a vast fortune, which he is beginning to apply to purposes of public utility. He is now employed in a great enterprise for building, at a cost of about four million dollars, a small town in the immediate vicinity of New York, which will afford to clerks and others of small means comfortable suburban' residences at moderate rents. Within New York he is rearing an immense pile, destined to afford cheap lodgings and adequate protection to the hard-worked

and poorly-paid class of sempstresses and other like female workers. Owing everything to New York, and unblessed with children, it is understood to be Mr. Stewart's intention and desire to repay his debt to the city by wise and patriotic devotion of his wealth to the promotion of the welfare of its poor and laborious citizens. And so the aspiring New Yorker sees with pride among the aristocrats' this newly-enriched dry-goods merchant, whose origin was of the humblest, whose wealth is of to-day, whose influence, politically and socially, is paramount; he hears with satisfaction of Mr. Stewart's marble palace, of his gallery of pictures, of the respect paid to his wife by princes, of the offers made to him of the highest offices of the state, of his humble beginnings, great achievement, and noble objects.

This is the type of 'aristocracy' which New York abundantly presents. Its Marquis of Westminster is the son of a journeyman furrier, who, emigrating to the shores of New York, and acquiring a fortune in the fur business, had the shrewdness and wisdom to foresee that the growth of New York would make investment in real estate the most certain of all speculations, and so became the purchaser of farm-lands and wastes fifty years ago at less for the acre than they now sell by the yard. He left the traces of his sense of indebtedness to the city by the foundation of the Astor Library, named after him; and his son and grandsons, following rigidly the precepts and example of the founder of the family, are now the type of what is accepted in New York as the highest class of aristocrat. With an immediate wealth in landed property which can hardly be estimated, and which cannot probably be equalled by the possessions of any other proprietors in the world, and with a sure prospective increase which outruns calculation, the grandsons of Jacob Astor are as rigidly attentive to the management of their affairs, as carefully considerate of all plans for the development of the resources of their possessions, and as personally solicitous for the improvement of the general aspects of the city, as any small householder or land-agent can be. Public interests in no way suffer from the accumulation of property in their hands. They do not think themselves privileged to be idle. They find their pleasure in accepting and vigorously fulfilling the responsibilities of wealth; they are hard-working, welleducated, public-spirited, upright, unostentatious gentlemen; and so they fulfil the American ideal of aristocracy. Of wealth unassociated with education, ill-gotten or mysteriously amassed-of triumphant rascality well gilded-of shameless and successful roguery blazing with ostentatious finery, holding court in public places, having its retinue of literary heralds, its train of judicial abettors, its crowd of political accomplices-there are here more striking examples than can be well conceived by the foreigner, or expressed without apparent exaggeration. Station has nothing of hereditary or fixed, politi

cal office implies discredit rather than honour, judicial office is very frequently the by-word of the market-place, and the judge's mantle the mere cloak of corruption, which it covers without pretending to conceal. Even in the learned professions, the avenues to distinction have not always been of the most honourable and regular character, and the safeguards for education and character are only beginning to be satisfactorily and completely organised. The conventional tests belonging to the society of the capitals of Europe do not therefore exist here. Men claim their admission into society not for what they have been or may be-from the associations connected with an historic name, from the acknowledged culture, probity, and public spirit necessarily attaching to political or judicial position, or from the tacitly acknowledged guarantees belonging to transmitted connection with great names, old families, public duties, and professional pursuits; their claim is of to-day, it regards neither the future nor the past.

Such is the versatility of the people, and so numerous and varying the avenues of enterprise which the country offers, that a large proportion of the men one meets have passed through a variety of pursuits before finally settling on that in which their success has brought them to the surface. The successive metamorphoses of sailor, clerk, gold-digger, dry-goods merchant, cotton-planter, shipowner, blockade-runner, liquor-dealer, stock-operator, and cottonbroker have been passed through by one comparatively young and wealthy man. To find soldiers who were bred as lawyers, leading stockbrokers bred as doctors, sugar-planters, or dry-goods merchants, to find judges who have been shoemakers and shoemakers who have been bred to the law, are not uncommon incidents. Hence a visitor falling upon some of the many rougher specimens of the upper ten, may easily set down the general standard of cultivation, refinement, or morality as infinitely lower than it should justly be marked; he needs to have adequate means of correcting his judgment by wider subsequent experience, and to make due allowance for the dissonance of the elements of a concourse so frequently renewed under multitudinous influences not easily harmonised or regulated.

Amid all the fluctuations and eccentricities, there is much in New-York social organisation to charm, to attract, to elicit admiration and gratitude. The various merits of many forms of national character, the attractions of many kinds of national cultivation, thought, and mode of pleasure-seeking, are there remarkably combined. The Saxon earnestness and energy are evidenced by the multitude of enterprises, the restless commercial activity which is always stirring, the seriousness and solidity of the religious feeling, the family life, and the love of free institutions. German intellectuality brings about a more genuine love of philosophic and metaphysical inquiry, and general tolerance. The sober industry, the

love of broad humour, the simple tastes for public amusement, the wide cultivation of music, all testify to German influence. The Liederkranz and the Arion, the universal presence of a piano in every respectable house, the männer gesängverein, and the love of public processions, are among the milder social influences of Germany upon America. France exerts her influence in the love of amusement, the attention to all the refinements of dress, the habitual gaiety of the season, the love of opera and masqued balls, the open welcome and habitual courtesy to strangers. The hospitality which Americans receive in Paris, where they are favourite guests at the Tuileries as in all the leading salons, and the courtesies and pleasures to which they become habituated, they practise and import into New York, not only for their own delectation, but for the benefit of strangers. The relative inhospitality of London and Londoners is much felt, and is a source of comment. The Londoner who goes to New York with any adequate introduction receives a welcome of prolonged friendliness. He is admitted to the houses, and shares at once in the pleasures and pursuits, of new American friends. Nor does a single card of invitation to a state-dinner there, as here, ease the conscience of all the duties of hospitality. The clubs are thrown open to him—sometimes for a week or fortnight, or in some cases for a much longer period-and he is entitled to all the privileges of membership. There are very few clubs in London in which a foreigner on a visit will be admitted farther than the hall or the strangers' room.

The houses to which a foreigner is admitted who presents his credentials in New York offer much to attract and to elicit admiration. As the people themselves are descended from every nationality, and continually renew their drafts upon all the European peoples, and their intimacy with the indulgences of European capitals, so their homes are replete with the suggestions of cosmopolitan intelligence, luxury, and refinement. The greater part of modern New-York houses are substantially built of brownstone, on a peculiarly convenient plan. They are furnished with a lightness and elegance which recall only Parisian salons. The walls and ceilings are habitually frescoed by Italian decorators in a style unknown in this country, but of entirely Italian taste. Carpeted and curtained to suit English ideas of comfort; with furniture and hangings of French beauty and taste, and largely executed by French artists; frescoed in delicate arabesque; wainscoted for the most part in walnut-wood or mahogany, in lieu of painted or grained deal; with abundant baths and high-pressure water-supply on each floor; with doors which usually slide into the walls, so as to allow the suites of rooms to be thrown together; the passages and staircases heated in winter by hot air, while the apartments have open fire-grates, the ordinary good-class houses of New York combine all the best attributes of