The Sun.
London, England, 1863-12-22 00:00:00

apartments are already bespoken beforehand,nit by

chance travellers, but by resident families, for whom
the ease of their inn has greater charms than the
sanctuary of a narrow home. The extravagant rise
in the price of building lots, the high wages of
labour, the scarcity of fuel, and the indifferent

quality of domestic service, conspire with the innate

"social" instincts of the American to induce him to

give preference to this collective and almost commu-
nistic method of housekeeping. New York is fast

being organised into a vast phalanstere and cara-
vansary. Domestic privacy is gradually becoming
the exception; and the Fifth Avenue Hotel, origi-

nally intended as a mere house for lodging and

boarding, has now become a sort of evening ex-
change, where "balls and bears° congregate after
their dinner, and where they have lately organised
over their wine a monster National Bank, after the

•
most approved Chase pattern, with a capital (paper

of fifty millions of dollars.,
These habits of gipsy life naturally engender luxu-
rious, frivolous, extravagant habits. The New
Yorkers live by the day, crowding their enjoy-
ments upon one another with restless eagerness, and
almost painful alacrity- The city beasts, as we are
informed, no less than 20 theatres and other. places of
amusement—English, French, Italian, and German,
drama and opera, all of an inferior kind, so far as
my taste and experience go, without counting free
concert halls, saloons, "gardens," which it
would be difficult to numbar. The Western metro-
polis beats London in establishments of this nature,
and comes up very nearly to the standard of Paris.
The rage for spectacles has been greatly in the
ascendant since the outbreak of the war, and every
public room was this year pre-engaged from October
or November up to the close of March and April.
Two or three German play-houses have no repose
even on Sundays. Nor are private entertainments
less brisk. Balls and parties never have been so
numerous; never was there so much " going on."
French and Italian men-of-war have contributed
their share of polkas and champagne suppers ; the
r Russians especially have been the lions of the day,
only, alas ! to be set down as mere bears the day
after, to be scouted as "cursed tallow-eating, irre-
claimable barbarians." Nowhere perhaps is a more

raging thirst for money to be found closely allied to
a more utter contempt for money. Now York, one
would say, is no better than a vast gambling house.

Drive out on any fine Saturday afternoon to hear
the music in the new Central Park, and the sight

of those thousands of carriages, bran new, flaunting

and glittering, will speak to you of fortunes made

no sooner than yesterday, to be unmade no later than
to-morrow. The thought of the morrow seems to
weigh on no man here. That the great financial
crash must come, that the day is to dawn in which
greenbacks are to be of no more worth than as many
dry leave; no man in his senses has the slightest
doubt; but it is precisely because the prosperity of
the city and the country is so precarious and ephe-
meral that every sensible man is so anxious to enjoy
his own share of the good things of this.world ; it
is because Mr. Chase's currency is so flimsy and
perishable that they are all anxious to be rid of it,
investing it in anything that may look like solid
wealth, or yield an hour's gratification and solace.
The efforts of the New Yorker, as indeed of the
American everywhere out of Boston, are all directed
to belie his English origin, and to affect Fiench
tastes, habits, and manners. Much of the Anglo-
e:axon enterptise, strength, steadiness, and lainrious
ingenuity lies at the bottom here, but on the surface
youvg America apes French levity, and evinces
fond partiality for Parisian cookery, millinery, and
confectionery. 'We have here much of the glitter,
the dissipation, the harum scarum recklessness of
Continental European out-of-door life. The Ame-
rican is a sort of half•Frenchified John Bull. You
might fancy Paterfamilias away on a spree for a
week or two across the Channel, forgetting himself
among the booths and kursaals of a watering place,
and indulging abroad in those freaks and frolics of
which ho would be heartily ashamed at home.
Whatever is not a shop or a banking house in New
York reminds you of a large, idle, and somewhat
sinful watering-place. I shall not repeat all I read
in the newspapers of uncharitable neighbouring
cities, especially in those of sanctimonious,
emulous Philadelphia, with respect to the thou-
sands of pickpockets and the scores of thousands
of worse "social evils" which prowl about New
York streets. That the town is no better than it
should be, the most honest inhabitants are at all
times anxious to inform you; though they hasten to
tell you in the same breath that all the good is in-
digenous, all the evil of foreign importation. But
what I feel inclined to quarrel with is not so much
low vice in all its hideousness, the haunts of which
yawn at the door of too many low cellars in Broad-
way or the Bowery, as that rakish fondness for dis-
sipation, of a more or less harmless character, that
distaste for home and settled life, which, coupled
with the inveterate habits of town residence in all
American communities, and the prevalence of pig-
ging together at hotels and boarding-houses, has
undermined so much of the earnestness, soberness,
and healthiness of the Anglo-Saxon character as
transplanted into this Western Continent.
It was early in October when I came back to this
city, after a short Western tour, and I was amazed
to find at that early time the whole population
already gathered together within their town walls,
after a short absence in their idle haunts of Saratoga
and Newport. Real country life is nos-there in
favour in America. The citizen who is boxed up
in his fine hous in Fifth Avenue for at least ten
months in the year never leaves town without
taking the town itself along with him, his friends
and acquaintances, his hotel and his theatre,
to the watering-place to which he reluctantly
resorts for a few weeks reluctantly, and
chiefly to please the queen of his household, who
expects to sport more gorgeous silks, more sparkling
jewels, and a more outrageously trailing crinoline
under the colonnade of the Ocean-house than she
ever did on the Broadway sags. Sweet, shady
nooks, and charming corners, and comfortable
villas dot here and there the vivid green of Staten
Island, of the Jersey shore, and of all the environs
of this lovely New York bay. Snug rural retreats
are to be enjoyed, summer and winter, at a few
minutes' distance from Wail-street, just across the
ferry. But your real New Yorker is no more to be
weaned from his Avenue than the Parisian from his
Boulevards, and the country homes round the bay
are much more frequently tenanted by new settlers
from the Old World than by natives of this conti-
nent. Even the Briton on his first arrival soon
learns to do at New York as the New Yorkers do;
ht,Becomes a gregarious animal, and October and
&sea, .
'icaber are still displaying all the gorgeous traits
are
ae, A
Ix
La enema " fall," when already fields nil woods
left
to unbroken solitude, and the country is
pronouot,,d to be uninhabitable. Truly, the climate
is all that 14
wish either in or out of town.
The purity 9:lt may
la American sky is hardly to be
with all litaiti,,, -.Ed
itself, lion heated hearths, has no
power to darken. or Bally the white marble purity
of this Westero metiApoil
the lucky American re
joicing in the best -
kind ofas
anthracite coal—a fuel
which gives heat without dirt, fire without smoke.

two
day,M,
uttoting in the pre-
serves of Ear: Dudley, at Willey.,
e destroyed. The
week, exactly 2,0D0 head of
the Duo d'Aumale, Earl twu ,
sportsmen were
kerville, Sir T. S. Pakington, M. P., Mr. p. ve€3:: Carl Tan-
Mr. Dowdeswell, Mr. Cookes, and Mr. n. 'Ter:limy; M.P.,
ADVERTISEMENT.J—Avoid medicines: they 51,,,a1;kg.
vate chronic complaints, but Du Barry's Delleio,:,arl: a,-
Restoring' Revalenta Arabica Food, which saves ratty times
its cost in other remedies, invariably cures them, reatc;,:
perfect digestion, strong nerves, sound lungs. healthy 11,;,
pure blood, refreshing sleep, functional regularity, and energ.y
to the most disordered or enfeebled. 'We extract a few out
of 69,0G0 Cures:—Curs No. 53,216 of the Marchioness de
Br6han, Paris, of a liver complaint, wasting away for seven
years, debility, NVith a nervous palpitation all over, bad
digestion, constant sleeplessness, the most intolerable nervous
Otation, and dreadfully low spirited.—Cure No. 1,771. Lord
Stuart de Dries, Lord Lieut. of Waterford, of many years'
dyspepsia.—No. 49,832. "Fifty years' indescribable mony
from dyspepsia, nervousness, asthma, cough, constipation,
tiatulen.y, spasms, sickness, and vomiting.—Maria Jolly."
—Cure No. -10,270. Mr. James Roberts, of Frilnley, Surrey, of
thirty years' diseased lungs, spitting of blood, liver derange
ment, and partial deafness.—Cure No. 47,121. Miss Elizabeth
.Jacobs, of extreme nervousness, indigestion, gatherings, low
,T rits. and nervous fancies.-- Cure No. 54,16. The Rev. Jas,
, Fakenham, Norfolk, "of indi&eation and torpi-
dity of the liver, which had resist ' all "medical treatment."
In tins. 1 lb., Is. 9d. ; 21b., 4e. 6d,
103.—Barry Du Barry and Co.,
also Fortnum and Mason ;
every town of the United ; resists
115.;21b., 228. ; _4lb
iiNo. 77, Regent-street, London;
_ hind all Grocers and Cbeeliets to
E adora.