ge or to
load, or were coming and going, to say nothing of other craft; "dear,
good old Albany! you are a town to which I ever return with pleasure,
for you at least never disappoint me. A first-rate country-place you
are; and, though I miss your quaint old Dutch church, and your
rustic-looking old _English_ church from the centre of your principal
street, almost every change _you_ make is respectable. I know nothing
that tells so much against you as changing the name of Market street by
the paltry imitation of Broadway; but, considering that a horde of
Yankees have come down upon you since the commencement of the present
century, you are lucky that the street was not called the Appian Way.
But, excellent old Albany! whom even the corruptions of politics cannot
change in the core, lying against thy hillside, and surrounded with thy
picturesque scenery, there is an air of respectability about thee that I
admire, and a quiet prosperity that I love. Yet, how changed since my
boyhood! Thy simple stoups have all vanished; thy gables are
disappearing; marble and granite are rising in thy streets, too, but
they take honest shapes, and are free from the ambition of mounting on
stilts; thy basin has changed the whole character of thy once
semi-sylvan, semi-commercial river; but it gives to thy young manhood an
appearance of abundance and thrift that promise well for thy age!"

The reader may depend on it that I laughed heartily at this rhapsody;
for I could hardly enter into my uncle's feelings. Albany is certainly a
very good sort of a place, and relatively a more respectable-looking
town than the "_commercial_ emporium," which, after all, externally, is
a mere huge expansion of a very marked mediocrity, with the pretension
of a capital in its estimate of itself. But Albany lays no claim to be
anything more than a provincial town, and in that class it is highly
placed. By the way, there is nothing in which "_our_ people," to speak
idiomatically, more deceive themselves, than in their estimate of what
composes a capital. It would be ridiculous to suppose that the
representatives of such a government as this could impart to any place
the tone, opinions, habits and manners of a capital; for, if they did,
they would impart it on the novel principle of communicating that which
they do not possess in their own persons. Congress itself, though
tolerably free from most shackles, including those of the constitution,
is not up to that. I