The Project Gutenberg eBook, Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January,
1861, by Various

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Title: Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861

Author: Various

Release Date: February 16, 2004 [eBook #11118]

Language: English

Character set encoding: US-ASCII

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ATLANTIC MONTHLY VOLUME 7, NO. 39,
JANUARY, 1861***

E-text prepared by Joshua Hutchinson, Tonya Allen, and Project Gutenberg
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THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.

VOL. VII.--JANUARY, 1861.--NO. XXXIX.

WASHINGTON CITY.

Washington is the paradise of paradoxes,--a city of magnificent
distances, but of still more magnificent discrepancies. Anything may be
affirmed of it, everything denied. What it seems to be it is not; and
although it is getting to be what it never was, it must always remain
what it now is. It might be called a city, if it were not alternately
populous and uninhabited; and it would be a wide-spread village, if it
were not a collection of hospitals for decayed or callow politicians. It
is the hybernating-place of fashion, of intelligence, of vice,--a resort
without the attractions of waters either mineral or salt, where there is
no bathing and no springs, but drinking in abundance and gambling in
any quantity. Defenceless, as regards walls, redoubts, moats, or other
fortifications, it is nevertheless the Sevastopol of the Republic,
against which the allied army of Contractors and Claim-Agents
incessantly lay siege. It is a great, little, splendid, mean,
extravagant, poverty-stricken barrack for soldiers of fortune and
votaries of folly.

Scattered helter-skelter over an immense surface, cut up into scalene
triangles, the oddity of its plan makes Washington a succession of
surprises which never fail to vex and astonish the stranger, be he ever
so highly endowed as to the phrenological bump of locality. Depending
upon the hap-hazard start the ignoramus may chance to make, any
particular house or street is either nearer at hand or farther off than
the ordinary human mind finds it agreeable to believe. The first duty of
the new-comer is to teach his nether