treets, foibles, manners, and emotions in the
early years of the twentieth century.

Our literature has, as yet, given us no figure analogous to that Last
New Zealander of Macaulay. But in the bustling New York of fifty or one
hundred years hence the dreamer or the student wishing to feel how the
inhabitants of Manhattan lived three or four score years ago, or how we
are living today, will not disdain to turn over pages originally
designed to lighten the tedium of idle hours.

Now and again, in the novels of the fifties and sixties, there are
glimpses of the stretch from Washington Square to Fourteenth Street, but
the greater Fifth Avenue, as a factor in fiction, dates from about the
time when Daisy Miller became a type. To those who really understand
them, every one of the great, vital streets of the world has a soul as
well as a body. The social invader from the West, the merchant whose
establishment still found profit in Grand Street, the banker from Broad
Street, or the ship's chandler from South, the club awakening to the
fact that its quarters on Broadway or in one of the side streets near
Irving Place was too far downtown, or in size inadequate to its growing
membership--those were the agencies that wrought the Avenue's material
development. But it was the American travelling in Europe in the days
when we first found Henry James's heroine on the shores of Lake Geneva
and later in Rome, when transatlantic voyagers were not so commonplace
as they became later, whose pangs of homesickness in his _pension_ in
the Rue de Clichy in Paris, or his hotel in Sorrento, first invested
Fifth Avenue with a spirit. It was different perhaps when he returned
home with a slight pose of foreign manners, to bask for a brief moment
in the sunny flood of distinction that was due him as a kind of later
Sir John Franklin. But over there what were cathedral naves and spires,
or art galleries, or purple Mediterranean waves, or laboriously acquired
French verbs, to the jutting brown-stone stoops and the maples breaking
into blossom?

There was a kind of writing, not fish or flesh or good red herring, but
just the same altogether charming in its day, inspiring of dreams, and a
vehicle for pleasant fancy. It belonged to what, from our grave old
point of view, was the youth of the world, and the spirit of youth, its
ingenuousness, and its ardour, were needed to appreciate it. Ik Marvel's
"Reveries of a Bachelor" was of that _genre_--and how