is stay at Recoaro so much that he was persuaded by his
hospitable friends to prolong his visit for a few days longer than he had
planned, but, on July 27, he and his friend Mr. Ferguson bade adieu and
proceeded on their journey. Verona and Brescia were visited and on July
29 they came to Milan. The cathedral he finds "a most gorgeous building,
far exceeding my conception of it"; and of the beautiful street of the
Corso Porta Orientale he says: "It is wider than Broadway and as superior
as white marble palaces are to red brick houses. There is an opinion
prevalent among some of our good citizens that Broadway is not only the
longest and widest, but the most superbly built, street in the world. The
sooner they are undeceived the better. Broadway is a beautiful street, a
very beautiful street, but it is absurd to think that our brick houses of
twenty-five feet front, with plain doors and windows, built by contract
in two or three months, and holding together long enough to be let, can
rival the spacious stone palaces of hundreds of feet in length, with
lofty gates and balconied windows, and their foundations deeply laid and
slowly constructed to last for ages." This was, of course, when Broadway
even below Fourteenth Street, was a residence street.

Attending service in the cathedral on Sunday, and being, as usual,
wearied by the monotony and apparent insincerity of it all, he again
gives vent to his feelings:--

"How admirably contrived is every part of the structure of this system to
take captive the imagination. It is a religion of the imagination; all
the arts of the imagination are pressed into its service; architecture,
painting, sculpture, music, have lent all their charm to enchant the
senses and impose on the understanding by substituting for the solemn
truths of God's Word, which are addressed to the understanding, the
fictions of poetry and the delusions of feeling. The theatre is a
daughter of this prolific mother of abominations, and a child worthy of
its dam. The lessons of morality are pretended to be taught by both, and
much in the same way, by scenic effect and pantomime, and the fruits are
much the same.

"I am sometimes even constrained to doubt the lawfulness of my own art
when I perceive its prostitution, were I not fully persuaded that the art
itself, when used for its legitimate purposes, is one of the greatest
correcters of grossness and promoters of refinement. I have been led,
since I have been