, Placide, or the elder Wallack walked there
with a kind of professional self-complacency. Thackeray, who had a quick
and trained eye for the characteristic in cities, delighted in Broadway,
for its cheerful variety, its perpetual "comedy of life"; the
significance whereof is only more apparent to the sympathetic observer,
because now and then through the eager throng glides the funeral car to
the sound of muffled drums, the "Black Maria" with its convict load, or
the curtained hospital litter with its dumb and maimed burden. And then,
to the practised frequenter, how, one by one, endeared figures and faces
disappear from that diurnal stage! It seems but yesterday since we met
there Dr. Francis's cheering salutation, or listened to Dr. Bethune's
and Fenno Hoffman's genial and John Stephens's truthful talk,--watched
General Scott's stalwart form, Dr. Kane's lithe frame, Cooper's
self-reliant step, Peter Parley's juvenile cheerfulness,--and grasped
Henry Inman's cordial hand, or listened to Irving's humorous
reminiscence, and met the benign smile of dear old Clement Moore. As to
fairer faces and more delicate shapes,--to encounter which was the
crowning joy of our promenade,--and "cheeks grown holy with the lapse of
years," memory holds them too sacred for comment. "Passing away" is the
perpetual refrain in the chorus of humanity in this bustling
thoroughfare, to the sober eye of maturity. The never-ending procession,
to the sensitive and the observant, has also infinite degrees of
language. Some faces seem to welcome, others to defy, some to lower, and
some to brighten, many to ignore, a few to challenge or charm,--as we
pass. And what lessons of fortune and of character are written
thereon,--the blush of innocence and the hardihood of recklessness, the
candid grace of honor and the mean deprecatory glance of knavery,
intelligence and stupidity, soulfulness and vanity, the glad smile of
friendship, the shrinking eye of fallen fortune, the dubious recognition
of disgrace, the effrontery of the adventurer, and the calm, pleasant
bearing of rectitude,--all that is beautiful and base in humanity,
gleams, glances, and disappears as the crowd pass on.

Richard Cobden, when in New York, was caught and long detained in a mesh
of drays and carriages in Broadway, and he remarked that the absence of
passionate profanity among the carmen and drivers, and the good-natured
patience they manifested, were in striking contrast with the bl