To set forth great things by small, a bridal pair remove from the East and settle in our Western wilds. In a score of years they return to their native place, wearing the very garments in which they had stood up and been pronounced husband and wife. The picture is equal to a volume of history and one of comedy, the two bound in one. But here, instead of a score of _years_ we have a score of _ages_, reaching back to a period farther beyond that great popular movement in which modern society had its birth, than that is anterior to our own age. If all the costumes, fashions, implements, and tools of the house, the shop, and the field, insignia and liveries, from those of the first Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam, down to those of New York's belles, beaux, and beggars of the present day, should be made to pass in review before us, how absurdly grotesque would be the scene! That veritable 'History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, by Diedrick Knickerbocker,' has perhaps shaken as many sides and helped digest as many dinners as almost any book since Cervantes gave the world his account of the adventures of his knight Don Quixote, and yet this great historical work hints but a part of that picture, though doubtless greatly improved by the author's delicate touches, which would pass before us in a procession illustrating two centuries of New York's history. Using such hints, the reader may partially judge of the impression made by this setting forth of seven centuries of a capital of Central Europe, and yet one can hardly tell, without the trial, whether he would rather smile at the grotesqueness of the pageant, or be lost in the profound contemplation of the magnificent march of history reënacted in this drama.