American building of the seventeenth century with as much reverence as
if it had been a contemporary of the Plantagenets; and, indeed, if
antiquity is to be determined by change and development rather than by
mere flight of time, the two centuries of New York will hold their own
with a cycle of Cathay. It is, as Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes remarked
to the present writer, like the different thermometrical scales; it
does not take very long to realise that twenty-five degrees of Reaumur
mean as great a heat as ninety degrees of Fahrenheit. Such a city as
Boston amply justifies its inclusion in a "Historic Towns" series,
along with London and Oxford; and it is by no means a singular
instance. Even the lover of art will not find America an absolute
Sahara. To say nothing of the many masterpieces of European painters
that have found a resting-place in America, where there is at least
one public picture gallery and several private ones of the first
class, the best efforts of American painters, and perhaps still more
those of American sculptors, are full of suggestion and charm; while I
cannot believe that the student of modern architecture will anywhere
find a more interesting field than among the enterprising and original
works of the American school of architecture.

This book will be grievously misunderstood if it is supposed to be in
any way an attempt to cover, even sketchily, the whole ground of
American civilisation, or to give anything like a coherent
appreciation of it. In the main it is merely a record of personal
impressions, a series of notes upon matters which happened to come
under my personal observation and to excite my personal interest. Not
only the conditions under which I visited the country, but also my own
disqualifications of taste and knowledge, have prevented me from more
than touching on countless topics, such as the phenomena of politics,
religion, commerce, and industry, which would naturally find a place
in any complete account of America. I have also tried to avoid, so far
as possible, describing well-known scenery, or in other ways going
over the tracks of my predecessors. The phenomena of the United States
are so momentous in themselves that the observation of them from any
new standpoint cannot be wholly destitute of value; while they change
so rapidly that he would be unobservant indeed who could not find
something new to chronicle.

It is important, also, to remember that the generalisation