University of Virginia Library

A WALK IN BROADWAY.[1]

Reader! gentle or ungentle! if thou for a moment
supposest that I, in placing this or any other forthcoming
paper under the same title as the essays of
Samuel Johnson, have the slightest intention of
being as grave, as learned, as wise and as eloquent
as the worthy doctor, be not alarmed: read but to
the end of this lucubration, and thou wilt be convinced
that no such outrage against the prevailing
taste of the times is intended. I do not say but
that I could be all this, if it so pleased me; but I
hope I have too much discretion, as well as too
strong a desire to be read, to harbor the smallest
thought of gravity or wisdom in an age when startling
paradoxes have such a decided advantage over
sober truths. Antiquated authors like Steele, Addison,
Goldsmith, or Johnson, who are now, indeed,
fast falling into deserved oblivion, but whose names

may possibly be remembered by a few of the most
erudite of this generation, wrote to instruct; their
wiser descendants aim at the higher province of
amusement; and a writer that is now detected attempting
to be useful, is justly looked upon as no
better than he should be. If any instruction is to
be administered, it must be as pills are to children
—smothered in sweetmeats. The grand secret of
composition now-a-days (except among the highest,)
is to be flippant, fantastical, and unfeeling, together
with the judicious use of notes of exclamation
and interrogation, and a copious admixture of
dashes and asterisks. But this is foreign to the
matter in hand.

I have been a wanderer for the major part of my
sinful life in different parts of the globe, and among
other places have frequently wandered up and down
Broadway, a street situated on a small island between
the East and North rivers in the state of
New-York, and which the inhabitants of the said
small island boast of as being the finest promenade
in the United States, much to the discomfort of the
mild and equable citizens of the neighboring city of
Philadelphia, who, upon the hearing of such an
assertion, wax exceeding wrothful, and straightway
commence talking, with great energy and animation,
of butter and water. At first I could not perceive

the connexion; but was afterwards given to
understand, that as Broadway and business were
the boast of New-York, so were pure water and
excellent butter the distinguished attributes of Philadelphia;
and that the one was invariably used as
a set-off against the other! (In what strange ways,
and after what strange fashions, will not men claim
distinction!) Nay, to such a height has this frantic
lust of pre-eminence been carried, that blood has
been spilt, and the peace of families wrecked, upon
the butter question; and a New-York merchant
tenderly attached to, beloved by, and upon the brink
of marriage with, a Philadelphia heiress, after a
three years' struggle against numerous rivals and
difficulties, actually lost the lady at last by audaciously
and pertinaciously affirming, that “the butter
was good enough, but nothing to make a noise
about!”

Broadway, however, is a very fine street, the
longest, it is said, in a direct line, in the world.
There is not any thing particularly splendid in it,
and the stores, in general, are neither large nor elegant,
with an unseemly disproportion of lottery-offices
among them; but the almost unbroken
line of respectable houses, neatly painted, and
shaded by lofty trees, gives it an air of substantial
comfort, and at the same time of lightness and

freshness, highly desirable. It is pleasant to stroll
along it; or, indeed, the principal street of any
large city. What a motley group of beings—alike,
yet how different—are daily pressing and hurrying
over its pavements! What a multiplicity of hopes,
and fears, and petty plans, and lofty schemes, are
unceasingly fermenting in the bosom of every individual
that moves along the narrow footwalks!
Yet it is not the variety of human passions that
makes the wonder, for joy and sorrow, love and
hate, pride, vanity, interest, and ambition are common
to all; but the endless combinations formed
by those passions according to the different degrees
in which they preponderate and act on different
individuals, and on the same individuals in different
situations. Take up an arithmetic, and ten
simple figures form the ground-work; yet how
many million combinations, and no two alike, can
be created by these ten figures. So it is with man
and his concerns. And still, despite the individual
variety, what a general sameness prevails. The
hopes, and cares, and joys, and sorrows of one day
are like the hopes, and cares, and joys, and sorrows
of the next; and the same drama that is hourly
felt and acted in the streets of New-York, is playing
with equal animation amid the wealth and
smoke of London, and the sunshine and poverty
of Naples—the gravity of Madrid, and the gaiety of
Paris. Two thousand years ago, the “eternal
city” had her belles and beaux, her flirts and
dandies (a Roman dandy!)—and two thousand
years hence, or less time, will the cannibals of New-Zealand
have eschewed war dances and raw victuals,
and have their blue-stocking tea-parties, biscuit
and lemonade soirees, French cooks, and fashionable
quadrilles, as well as anybody. All is
still
and the probability is, that the antediluvians wrote
poetry, told lies, wore whiskers, and cheated their
neighbors, just as we do now.

It is also pleasant, as well as curious and profitable,
in roaming through a large city, to contrast its
present with its former situation—to compare what
it has been with what it is, and to speculate on what
it may be. New-York, to be sure, is not rich in
historical recollections, for she is comparatively a
thing of yesterday. In walking her streets we do
not feel as in the ancient capitals of Europe, that
our footsteps, perchance, fall on the very places
where those of the mighty dead have fallen before
us. In the older streets of London, we know that
we are walking where Richard, Duke of Gloucester,

“high-reaching Buckingham,” or Harry Hotspur,
actually walked, and that Shakspeare and Milton
familiarly trod even where we then tread; or the
High-street of Edinburgh—where the Leslie and
the Seyton, the Gordon and the Douglass, were
wont foolishly and gallantly to stab and dirk each
other for the “crown o' the causeway.” True, all
is now common-place and familiar; the merchant
plods homeward with his umbrella under his arm,
instead of his rapier by his side. But great as the
change is there from the past to the present, it has
still been gradual. Step by step have they toiled
their way from barbarism to civilization. Here, it
has been as the shifting of the scenery in a play,
rather than sober reality. It is but as the other
day when the forest flourished where now “merchants
most do congregate,” and the streamlet murmured
where the gin-shop stands. The council-fires
blazed and the sachems spoke to their young men
where now the honorable Richard Riker and the
honorable the corporation hold “long talks” about
small matters. The wigwam sent its tiny wreaths
of smoke into the clear air, where now the bank
coffee-house pours forth volumes of odoriferous
steam to mingle with the masses of vapor that overhang
the city like a cloud; and its tables groan
with “all the delicacies of the season” where the
deer from the wood and the fish from the stream,
were cooked and eaten without the aid of pepper
and salt—two of the greatest blessings of civilization.

And not more different than the scenes were the
actors concerned in them. Step aside, good reader,
and mark them as they now pass along Broadway.
The first is one but little known to Indian life—
one who lives by the folly and roguery of the fools
and rogues around him—a lawyer. He is clad in
solemn black, as if that were ominous of the gloom
which follows in his train. What would the Indian,
with his untaught natural sense of right and
wrong, think of this man's “quiddets, his quillets,
his cases, his tenures and his tricks;” and of “his
statutes, his recognizances, his fines, his double
vouchers and his recoveries?” Alas! the poor Indian
has but too deeply felt his power and the
power of his brethren in the modern “black art.”
They conjured away his pleasant haunts “under
the greenwood tree,” his silver streams teeming
with life, his beautiful lakes and fair hunting
grounds, all “according to law,” and left him a
string of beads and a bottle of fire-water, a bruised
heart and a broken spirit in their place. Here
comes another product of the present times, neither
rare nor valuable, indigenous to Broadway, and

flourishing there in peculiar rankness; a modern
Sir Fopling Flutter, of whom it may well be said
with the poet,
Mark with what affected effeminacy the full-grown
baby lounges along, and the air of listless indifference
or slightly awakened surprise with which it is
his pleasure to regard a fine woman; but what,
indeed, are all the women in the world to this caricature
of manhood, in comparison with his own
sweet self? Anon, another variety of the same
genus appears, quite as contemptible, not so amusing,
and a great deal more disagreeable. This is
your ruffian-dandy; one who affects a dashing
carelessness in his dress and deportment, wears
good clothes in a very ill fashion, and has generally
a checked shirt, a sailor's hat, or some other article
of dress sufficiently different from the ordinary
costume of those around him to render him an object
of notoriety. Mark the easy dignity of that
swagger as he rolls along, staring impudently at
all the women and frowning valiantly at all the
men, as if he expected every moment to be insulted,
and was afraid his courage might not be screwed
up “to the sticking place.” A sort of personage not
unlike Mike Lambourne in Kenilworth, allowing
for the modifications of the times. But lo! what
comes next—dame nature's loveliest work, a woman;
but, heaven and earth! how the mantuamaker
has spoiled her! Why, what frippery have
we here? Silks and lace, ribbons and gauze, feathers,
flowers, and flounces! Not but that these
are all excellent things in their way, when judiciously
used; but to see them all clustered, as in
the present instance, on one woman at one time, is
what the proverb states to be “too much of a good
thing,” or what the poet terms “wasteful and ridiculous
excess.” Then look at those sleeves in
which her arms are lost, and that acre of hat upon
her head, with a sufficiency of wheat ears and
flowers on it, were they real, to feed a family or
stock a garden. And see! as far as the eye can
reach it rests on colors as varied and fantastical as
the butterflies in summer or the leaves in autumn,
in which the dear creatures have arrayed themselves.
Oh, matrimony, matrimony! thou art indeed
becoming a luxury in which the rich and opulent
alone will be able to indulge. Nine small
children might be supported, but to deck out one
of Eve's daughters in this fashion three hundred
and sixty-five days in the year, is what nothing
but a prize in the lottery or a profitable bankruptcy
is equal to.—Still on they pass in throngs: the
grave and thoughtful student, abstracted from all
around, building up his day-dream of fame, fortune,
and beauty, and then in love with the cunning
coinage of his own brain; and the rich old
merchant, not in love with any thing but still in
raptures, for cotton has risen an eighth. On they
pass, the whiskered Don, the sallow Italian, the
bulky Englishman, and the spare Frenchman, all
as eager (as a professed moralist might say,) in the
pursuit of business and pleasure, as if enjoyment
were perpetual and life eternal: and all this where,
but a little while ago, the wolf made his lair, and
the savage his dwelling-place. Verily, as a profound
German philosopher acutely though cautiously observed—“let
a man live long enough, and it is probable
he will see many changes.”