From the Easy Chair, vol 1 | Page 7

talk; the talk of a poet, of a philosopher, of a scholar.
Its wit was a rapier, smooth, sharp, incisive, delicate, exquisite. The
blade was pure as an icicle. You would have sworn that the hilt was
diamond. The criticism was humane, lofty, wise, sparkling; the
anecdote so choice and apt, and trickling from so many sources, that we
seemed to be hearing the best things of the wittiest people. It was
altogether delightful, and the audience sat glowing with satisfaction.
There was no rhetoric, no gesture, no grimace, no dramatic familiarity
and action; but the manner was self-respectful and courteous to the
audience, and the tone supremely just and sincere. "He is easily king of
us all," whispered an orator.
Yet it was not oratory either in its substance or purpose. It was a
statement of what this wise man believed conversation ought to be. Its
inevitable influence--the moral of the lecture, dear Lady Flora--was a
purification of daily talk, and the general good influence of incisive
truth-telling. If we have ever had a greater preacher of that gospel who
is he?

SHOPS AND SHOPPING.
If the stranger in New York, on any pleasant day, finds himself near
Corporal Thompson's Broadway Cottage he will be in the midst of a
very pretty scene. Perhaps as he reads these words and asks the
question where that romantic cot may be found, he is comfortably
seated in it, with his feet placidly reposing upon its window-sills. It is,
indeed, in a new form. It no longer looks as it did to the early citizen of
fifty years ago, driving out before breakfast upon the Bloomingdale
Road, and surveying the calm river from the seclusion of Stryker's Bay.

It had an indefinable road-side English air in those far-off mornings.
The early citizen would not have been surprised had he heard the horn
of the guard merrily winding, and beheld the mail-coach of old England
bowling up to the door. There were fields and open spaces about it, for
it was on the edge of the city that was already reaching out upon the
island. Bloomingdale! Twas a lovely name, and 'tis a great pity that the
chief association with it is that of a very dusty road.
Meanwhile, if you will contemplate the Fifth Avenue Hotel you will
see Corporal Thompson's Broadway Cottage in its present form. But
what a busy, brilliant neighborhood it is now! There are shops that
recall the prettiest upon the boulevards in Paris; and the people are
greatly to be pitied who are too fine to stop and look into them. To be
too fine is to lose much. Yet what scion of the golden youth of this
moment would dare to walk by the site of Corporal Thompson's
Broadway Cottage eating an apple at three o'clock in the afternoon?
There was a grave and well-dressed gentleman who stopped recently at
the stand of Mrs. M'Patrick O'Finnigan, which is just in the midst of the
gay promenade, to transact some business in peanut candy. The interest
of the public in that operation was inconceivable. If he had been Mr.
Vanderbilt buying out Mr. Astor--if he had been a lunatic astray from
the asylum, or a clown escaped from the circus--he could hardly have
excited more attention. The passengers stared in amazement. Some
young gentlemen, escorting certain young ladies from school, cracked
excellent jokes upon the honest buyer of peanut candy; and if his
daughter or any friend had chanced to pass and had seen him, she
would probably have been seriously troubled and half ashamed.
Now peanut candy is very good, and at Mrs. M'Patrick O'Finnigan's
stand it is very cheap. Nobody is ashamed of liking it, nor of eating it.
If the grave gentleman had stepped into Caswell's brilliant shop, let us
suppose--where, perhaps, it is also sold--and had called for that
particular sweet, nobody would have stared nor made a joke nor felt
that it was extraordinary. Yet, how many of the brave generals in the
war, who charged in the very face of flaming batteries, would dare to
stop at Mrs. O'Finnigan's and buy ten cents' worth of peanut candy if
they saw Mrs. Sweller's carriage approaching, or Miss Dasher just
coming upon the walk? And as for the Misses Spanker, who daily drive
in that superb open wagon with yellow wheels, and who resemble

nothing so much as the figures in a Parisian doll-carriage, if they saw
an admirer of theirs bargaining for peanut candy at a street stand they
would not know him--they would no more bow to a man so lost to all
the finer sense of the comme il faut than they would nod to a
street-sweeper. It is astonishing what an effect is produced upon some
human beings of the