those of the even more emphatic
economical moralist of to-day. In 1794, Wansey, a commercial traveller,
found the "Tontine near the Battery" the most eligible hotel, and met
there Dr. Priestley, breakfasted with Gates, and had a call from
Livingston; saw "some good paintings by Trumbull, at the Federal Hall,"
and Hodgkinson, at the theatre, in "A Bold Stroke for a Husband"; dined
with Comfort Sands; and Mr. Jay, "brother to the Ambassador," took him
to tea at the "Indian Queen";--items of information that mark the social
and political transition since the days of Dutch rule, though the
Battery still remained the court end and nucleus of Manhattan.

But it is not local memory alone that the solitude of Broadway awakens
in our aged guide; the vacant walk is peopled, to his fancy, with
the celebrities of the past whom he has there gazed at or
greeted,--Franklin, Jay, Tom Paine, Schuyler, Cobbett, Freneau, and
Colonel Trumbull, with their Revolutionary prestige; Volney and Genet,
with the memory of French radicalism; Da Ponte and the old Italian
opera; Colles and Clinton and the Erie Canal days; Red Jacket and the
aborigines; Dunlap and Dennie, the literary pioneers; Cooke, Kemble,
Kean, Matthews, and Macready, followed so eagerly by urchin eyes,--the
immortal heroes of the stage; Hamilton, Clinton, Morris, Burr, Gallatin,
and a score of political and civic luminaries whose names have passed
into history; Decatur, Hull, Perry, and the brilliant throng of
victorious naval officers grouped near the old City Hotel; Moreau, Louis
Philippe, Talleyrand, Louis Napoleon, Maroncelli, Foresti, Kossuth,
Garibaldi, and many other illustrious European exiles; Jeffrey, Moore,
Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, and the long line of literary lions, from
Basil Hall to Tupper; Chancellor Kent, Audubon, Fulton, Lafayette,
Randolph, the Prince of Wales, and the Queen of the Sandwich Islands,
Turkish admirals, Japanese officials, artists, statesmen, actors,
soldiers, authors, foreign _savans_, and domestic eccentricities, who
have perambulated this central avenue of a cosmopolitan American city.
Could they have all been photographed, what a reflex of modern society
would such a picture-gallery afford!

The old Dutch traders, with the instinct of their Holland habitudes,
clung to the water-side, and therefore their domiciles long extended at
angles with what subsequently became the principal avenue of the
settlement; and until 1642 Pearl Street was