things by small, a bridal pair remove from the East
and settle in our Western wilds. In a score of years they return to
their native place, wearing the very garments in which they had stood up
and been pronounced husband and wife. The picture is equal to a volume
of history and one of comedy, the two bound in one. But here, instead of
a score of _years_ we have a score of _ages_, reaching back to a period
farther beyond that great popular movement in which modern society had
its birth, than that is anterior to our own age. If all the costumes,
fashions, implements, and tools of the house, the shop, and the field,
insignia and liveries, from those of the first Dutch settlers of New
Amsterdam, down to those of New York's belles, beaux, and beggars of the
present day, should be made to pass in review before us, how absurdly
grotesque would be the scene! That veritable 'History of New York from
the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, by Diedrick
Knickerbocker,' has perhaps shaken as many sides and helped digest as
many dinners as almost any book since Cervantes gave the world his
account of the adventures of his knight Don Quixote, and yet this great
historical work hints but a part of that picture, though doubtless
greatly improved by the author's delicate touches, which would pass
before us in a procession illustrating two centuries of New York's
history. Using such hints, the reader may partially judge of the
impression made by this setting forth of seven centuries of a capital of
Central Europe, and yet one can hardly tell, without the trial, whether
he would rather smile at the grotesqueness of the pageant, or be lost in
the profound contemplation of the magnificent march of history reenacted
in this drama.

This procession spoke but to the eye. It was but a tableau, dumb, though
in its way eloquent. It detailed no actions; it only hinted them. It
simply presented the men who acted, clad in the outward garb, and
bearing the tools and weapons of their day. The cut of a garment, the
form of a helmet or halberd, a saddle or a semitar, a hoe or a hatchet,
or the cut of the hair or the beard, may speak of the heart and soul,
only, however, by distant hints. But just as the representation is less
distinct and detailed, is it a mightier lever for imagination to use in
raising again to life centuries which had long slept in the dust. The
superstructure of history, indeed, which we should rear upon such a
b