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

apartments are already bespoken beforehand, not 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 comma-
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 "bulls 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 1
Yorkers live by the day, crowding their eujoy-
meats upon one another with restless eagerness, and
almost painful alacrity. The city boasts, as we are
informed, no less than 20 theatres and other paces of
amusement—English, French, Italian, and Germ-:n,
drama and opera, all of an inferior kind, so far as
e
my taste and experience go, without counting free
concert halls, saloons, "gardens," & ~ which it
would be difficult to number. 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
Russians especially have been the lions of the day,
only, alas! to be set down as mere b6ars 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. New 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-
mend 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 French
tastes, habits, and manners. Much of the Anglo-
Eaxon enterprise, strength, steadiness, and laborious
ingenuity lies at the bottom here, but on the surface
young America apes French levity, and evinces
four' partiality for Parisian cookery, millinery, and
confectionery. We have here much of the glitter,
the dissipaiion, the harum-scarum recklessness of
Continental European out-of-door life. The Awe-
rican is a sort of hallFrenchificd John Bull. You
might fancy Picerfamilias away on a spree for a
week or two acro:is the Channel, forgetting himselt
among the booths find kursuals of a watering-place,
and indulging abroad in those freaks and frolics of
which he 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-placo. 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
timesanxioua 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 nowhere in
favour in America. The citizen who is boxed up
in his fine house 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 lags. 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 Wall-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 fr.( quentiy 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;
he becomes a gregarious animal, and October and
November are still displaying all the gorgeous traits
I of an American " fall," when already fields and woods
r left to unbroken solitude, and the country is
1310°0Iinced to be uninhabitable. Truly the climate
is
he all ththat
purit3- `)1 man may wish either in or out of town.
matched
this American sky is hardly to be
itself, with en by Italy in all her glory, and winter
ull- its million heated hearths, has ro
powersle to darks
of
this -west:ren
Izor sully the white marble purity
o}is, the lucky American re. joicing in the bestetrk?
wien4to(flianthracite coal—a fuel
which gives beat
witteYys
without smoke.
A BATTTJE.—In two
shooting in the pre-
week, exactly 2,000 head oflast
ga_ Court, Worcestershire,
serves of Earl Dudley, at
sportsmen were the Due d'Aurnalwere destroyed. The
Pakington, 11. p Earl.. Dudley, Earl Tan-
Mr..,8 p
okes and . Vernon,M.P.
*Mr. Co ,e. lie 1
k e rvpi I loes,v
dSei
sr
svJe.
uS,
ENT:i—Avoid medicines: they
am, ming.
vate chronic complaints, but Du Barry', Den waYa aagra-
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elous Health
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oh''Yw
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