than any other street in Europe. The one, it is true,
is as straight as an airline, and the other nearly the shape of an S;
the one a paved roadway, noisy with the rush of traffic, and, in the
other, the water washing the very walls of palaces that are mournful and
deserted--while, as regards style, there is scarcely a single specimen
of the Venetian in this country.

But the resemblance is this: your prevailing impression from first to
last is the absence of all general arrangement, and the independent
elegance of each separate facade. Each tells the same story: it is the
wealth and enterprise of the citizen, and not the munificence of the
sovereign, that has added palace to palace, and made the dumb stones
eloquent. Remembering, then, that it is private taste and influence that
is to develop our art, we proceed to the analysis of the great
thoroughfare in question.

Fancy yourself, patient reader, at one end of this street, so as to
command its vista. What do you see? Architecture? Very little, we
imagine. Save the buildings immediately at your right and left, all the
others are seen in profile, a contingency never reckoned on by their
builders. The decoration is all piled on the front, as elaborate a
design, often, as Palladio ever dreamt of, but at the side, every
cornice and stringpiece stops as short as if it had been sawn off, and
the whole side is a flat blank piece of brickwork. This is greatly
aggravated by the disparity in height, and the ponderous cornices. As to
construction, the prevailing type is a flimsy pile of brick and timber,
'put up,' apparently, by mutual connivance of the contractor and the
coroner, and screened off from the street by a thin veneer of
'architecture.' Now there is a certain merit, _sui generis_, in a clever
deception, but those in vogue here are too utterly transparent to claim
even this. The telltale wall of brick cheats you out of the pleasure of
cheating yourself, no matter how charitably disposed.

Were it necessary to represent this street upon the stage, the decorator
would simply have to paint his scenes upon the edges, and leave the side
toward the audience bare. As you walk along you see a given building
sideways for five minutes or more, but you cannot see it as it was meant
to be seen--full in front--for as many seconds. We even know of churches
in the cross streets, though near Broadway, whose square towers are
stone-fronted after the usual fashion, but present nothin