structure just mentioned, that until he paints his bricks on Reade-street, so that they correspond as nearly as may be with his fronts on Chambers-street and Broadway, his store will indicate but a shabby gentility, an unnatural association of tow cloth and satin, copper and silver, poverty and riches, which should blush in the face of the most inferior exhibition of consistency. With the abolition of this strong contrast, the observer who goes down Broadway will contemplate with delight the classical air of this most imposing Palace of Trade that has yet been erected in the cities of the United States. How easily Broadway, for the money that its piles of brick and stone will have cost in ten years, might be made the most splendid street in Christendom, by a mere observance of the principles of taste and unity! [Illustration: PRINCIPAL HALL OF PETERSON & HUMPHREY'S CARPET HOUSE.] In a little hamlet of five or fifteen hundred inhabitants, great buildings are out of place. In a city like ours, every thing should be in keeping, and the predominant principle should be the _gigantesque_. If the lot-holders from Bowling Green to the New Park would but consider the matter, with intelligent reference not only to the glory of the city but to their own profit; if each separate square were built as if it were _one_ edifice (as, without any blending of property, it might be very easily), though these squares were all of plain brick, and no more costly than the well-known row of stores in William-street, what an imposing spectacle they would present! But if one block were like the Astor House, the next like Stewart's (except only the Reade street front), the next a row of free-stone, the next one of brick, the next one of granite,--here a Gothic, there a Byzantine, then a Corinthian, then, if you please, as plain a front as that of the New-York Hotel--with here and there a church, library, lyceum, or art gallery, of a style less suitable for shops or dwellings,--and there would be nothing in the world to compare with Broadway. But this running of democracy into the ground, this whim of every vulgar fellow who owns a front of twenty feet, that he must illustrate his independence by building on it in his own peculiar way, is baulking Providence, and for the full cost of magnificence confining us to tricksy meanness. Two or three years ago rose the chaste and simple front of 349 Broadway, in a row of decayed brick shops, which, it was hoped would give place to an entire range in imitation of the initial structure. But since then, the owner of a couple of adjoining lots--a Connecticut man probably--has caused to be put up two stores of a different style, not of half the value of continuations of the less expensive edifice which they join. If instead of this patchwork, now planted here for half a century, there had been an extension of uniform stores from corner to corner--though either Beck's or the building we have mentioned had been the model--the