Philadelphia is a flat, rectangular, clean, (almost too clean sometimes, for on Saturdays “nunquam cessavit lavari, aut fricari, aut tergeri, aut ornari, poliri, pingi, fingi,”[1]) uniform, well-built, brick and mortar, (except one stone house,) well-fed and watered, well-clad, moral, industrious, manufacturing, rich, sober, quiet, good-looking city. The Delaware washes its eastern and the Schuylkill its western front. The distance between the two rivers is one mile and three quarters, which space on several streets is nearly filled with houses. Philadelphia looks new, and is new, and like Juno always will be new; for the inhabitants are constantly pulling down and new-vamping their houses. The furor delendi with regard to old houses, is as rife in the bosoms of her citizens, as it was in the breast of old Cato with regard to Carthage. A respectable-looking old house is now a rare thing, and except the venerable edifice of Christ Church in Second above Market Street, we should hardly know where to find one. [Footnote 1: Plautus, Pænuli, Act i., sc. 2, l. 10.] The dwelling-houses in the principal streets are all very much alike, having much the air of brothers, sisters and cousins of the same family; like the supernumerary figures in one of West's historical paintings, or like all the faces in all of Stothard's designs. They are nearly all three stories high, faced with beautiful red unpainted Philadelphia brick, and have water tables and steps of white marble, kept so painfully clean as to make one fear to set his foot on them. The roofs are in general of cedar, cypress or pine shingles; the continued use of which is probably kept up (for there is plenty of slate,) to afford the Fire-Companies a little wholesome exercise. The streets are in general fifty feet wide, having on each side convenient _trottoirs_ well paved with brick, and a carriage way badly paved with large round pebbles. They are kept very clean, and the kennels are frequently washed by floods of pure Schuylkill water, poured from the iron pipes with which all the streets are underlaid. {446} This same Schuylkill water is the cause of many comforts in the shape of drinking, bathing and clean linen, (indusia toraliaque;) and enters into the composition of those delicious and persuasive liquids called Pepper's beer and Gray's ale and porter.