every coign of vantage around Niagara. Whether this abuse continues I
know not; but I know that the pill placards and sauce puffs which
blossom in our English meadows along every main line of railway are
quite as offensive. Far be it from me to deny that advertising is
carried to deplorable excesses in America; but in picking this out as a
differentia, Mr. Steevens shows that his intentness of observation in
New York has for the moment dimmed his mental vision of London. It is a
case, I fancy, in which the expectation was father to the thought.

Similarly, Mr. Steevens notes, "No chiropodist worthy of the name but
keeps at his door a modelled human foot the size of a cab-horse; and
other trades go and do likewise." The "cab-horse" is a monumental
exaggeration; but it is true that some chiropodists use as a sign a foot
of colossal proportions--the size of a small sheep, let us say, if we
must adopt a zoological standard. So far good; but the implication that
the streets of New York swarm, like a scene in a harlequinade, with
similarly Brobdingnagian signs is quite unfounded. Thus it is, I think,
that travellers are apt to seize on isolated eccentricities or
extravagances (have we no monstrous signs in England?) and treat them as
typical. Mr. Steevens came to America prepared to find everything
gigantic, and the chiropodist's foot so agreeably fulfilled his
expectation that he thought it unnecessary to look any further--"ex pede
Herculem."[C]

The architecture of New York, according to Mr. Steevens, is "the
outward expression of the freest, fiercest individualism.... Seeing it,
you can well understand the admiration of an American for something
ordered and proportioned--for the Rue de Rivoli or Regent Street." I
heard this admiration emphatically expressed the other day by one of the
foremost and most justly famous of American authors; but, unlike Mr.
Steevens, I could not understand it. "What!" I said, "you would
Haussmannise New York! You would reduce the glorious variety of Fifth
Avenue to the deadly uniformity of the Avenue de l'Opera, where each
block of buildings reproduces its neighbour, as though they had all been
stamped by one gigantic die!" Such an architectural ideal is
inconceivable to me. It is all very well for a few short streets, for a
square or two, for a quadrant like that of Regent Street, or a crescent
or circus like those of Bath or Edinburgh. But to apply it throughout a
whole quarter of a city, or