prefer leaving a decision where it _must_ finally be left—to the voice of the public opinion. One remarkable feature in the _Old World and the New_, is its amusing _naiveté_ of manner—a feature which will immediately arrest the attention of every reader. We cannot do better than give a few specimens. What a pity it is [says Mr. D., and so it is undoubtedly] that cities, or at least streets in cities, could not, like single edifices, be built upon some regular and well considered plan! Not that the result should be such regularity as is seen in Philadelphia or Dublin; the plan indeed would embrace irregularity. But there might be an arrangement, by which a block of buildings, a street, or indeed a whole city, might stand before us as one grand piece of architecture. If single specimens of architecture have the effect to improve, humanize, and elevate the ideas of a people; if they are a language, and answer a purpose kindred to that of literature, poetry and painting, why may not a whole city have this effect? To secure this result, there must, I am afraid, be a power like that of the autocrat of Russia, who, I am told, when a house is built in his royal city of St. Petersburg which does not conform to his general plan, sends word to the owner that he must remove that building and put up another of a certain description. And again, speaking of the Menai bridge— A celebrated lady (since dead) in speaking of this stupendous work, said that she first saw it from the Isle of Anglesea, so that it was relieved against the lofty mountains of North Wales; and she added in a strain {583} of eloquent and poetical comparison familiar to her, that Snowdon seemed to her a fit back ground for the Menai Bridge. All this may be very true, but then only think of the _eloquent and poetical comparison_ of Snowdon being a back ground for the Menai Bridge! Mrs. Hemans and our author go to church together. She spoke (says he) of the various accompaniments of the service, and when she came to the banners she said ‘they seemed to wave as the music of the anthem rose to the lofty arches!’ I ventured here to throw in a little dash of prose—saying that _I was afraid that they did not wave, that I wished they might, and looked up to see if they did, but could not see it._ Mr. Dewey does not like oatmeal cake. In good truth I should never desire to have any thing to do with it save as a specimen; for of all the stuff that ever I tasted, it was the most inedible, impracticable, insufferable, dry, hard, coarse, rasping, gritty, chaffy: I _could_ not eat it, and it seemed to me that if I could, it would be no more nourishing than gravel kneaded into mud, and baked in a lime-kiln. As to drink—whiskey! whiskey! the boatman said was the only thing, and the thing indispensable. I tasted of it—_and truly it had not the usual odious taste of our American whiskey!_