and are
all of the same style of building, generally two or three windows wide,
three stories high, and finished above with small red tiles, which
remind one of newly extracted bleeding teeth; while the broad and
accurately squared streets which these houses form seem to be bordered
by endlessly long barracks. This has its reason in the fact that every
English family, though it consist of only two persons, must still have a
house to itself for its own castle, and rich speculators, to meet the
demand, build, wholesale, entire streets of these dwellings, which they
retail singly. In the principal streets of the city, where the business
of London is most at home, where old-fashioned buildings are mingled
with the new, and where the fronts of the houses are covered with signs,
yards in length, generally gilt, and in relief, this characteristic
uniformity is less striking--the less so, indeed, because the eye of the
stranger is incessantly caught by the new and brilliant wares exposed
for sale in the windows. And these articles do not merely produce an
effect, because the Englishman completes so perfectly everything which
he manufactures, and because every article of luxury, every astral lamp
and every boot, every teakettle and every woman's dress, shines out so
invitingly and so _finished_. There is also a peculiar charm in the art
of arrangement, in the contrast of colors, and in the variety of the
English shops; even the most commonplace necessities of life appear in a
startling magic light through this artistic power of setting forth
everything to advantage. Ordinary articles of food attract us by the new
light in which they are placed; even uncooked fish lie so delightfully
dressed that the rainbow gleam of their scales attracts us; raw meat
lies, as if painted, on neat and many-colored porcelain plates,
garlanded about with parsley--yes, everything seems painted, reminding
us of the highly polished yet modest pictures of Franz Mieris. But the
human beings whom we see are not so cheerful as in the Dutch paintings,
for they sell the jolliest wares with the most serious faces, and the
cut and color of their clothes is as uniform as that of their houses.

On the opposite side of the town, which they call the West End--"_the
west end of the town_"--and where the more aristocratic and less
occupied world lives, the uniformity spoken of is still more dominant;
yet here there are very long and very broad streets, where all the