The distinction of East and West is marked in New-York as in London, though for different reasons. In London, the prevalence of westerly winds drives the surge waves of coal-smoke eastward, blackening every thing; in New-York the western part of the town is cleaner, because newer and built on a better plan. Broadway is the dividing line; and it is a violent strain upon one's standing in fashionable life to live eastward of it, below Union Square, even in the most expensive style. But the eastward world has its own great thoroughfare, wider than Broadway, though not as long, running nearly parallel with the main artery of the grander world. The Bowery--so called when it was the high road leading through the public farms or _Boweries_--is a sort of exaggerated Bishopsgate-street and Shoreditch united; more trades and callings, more articles offered for sale in the open air, more noise, more people, and at least as much natural, undisguised, vulgar life. A railway for horse-carriages passes through it, and hundreds of omnibuses and stage coaches, not to speak of carts and country wagons without number. A "rowdy" theatre or two, a hay-market, great clothing-shops, and livery-stables, a riding-school, an anatomical museum--such are its ornaments. Not a church countenances its entire length, nor any other public building aiming at elegance or dignity. The goods displayed in the windows are of a secondary quality, at best; and the people who throng the pavements are people who want second-rate articles. Yet the Bowery is worth walking through by a stranger, little as it is known or valued by the native citizen, whose lot has been cast in choicer neighborhood. The common pulse of humanity beats audibly and visibly there, wrapped in no cloak of convention or pseudo-refinement. The fundamental business of life is carried on there as being confessedly the main business; not, as in Broadway, as if it were a thing to be huddled into a corner to make way for the carved-work and gilding, the drapery and color of the great panorama. There is another reason why the Bowery has a claim on our attention. Strange as it may seem, it is from the people who haunt the Bowery that the United States take their character abroad. Foreigners insist upon considering the "Bowery b'hoys,"--a class at once an enigma and a terror to the greater portion of their fellow-citizens,--as distinctive specimens of Americanism, much to the horror of their more fastidious countrymen. This we think a great mistake, though truly there are worse people in the world than the "Bowery b'hoys," who are noted for a sort of _bonhomie_, in the midst of all their coarseness.