Suppose Elizabethan London had been his especial interest.  That he would have seen through the eyes of Sir John Falstaff and his riotous, dissolute cronies of the Boar’s Head Tavern.  Georgian London?  What better companion could he have had in his scheme of investigation than Mr. Thomas Jones, recently come up from the West Country?  For a vision of Corinthian London could he have done better than take up Conan Doyle’s “Rodney Stone,” with its vivid pictures of the stilted eccentrics who hovered about the Prince-Regent, the coffee-houses thronged with England’s warriors of the land and sea, and the haunts of the hard-faced men of the Prize Ring?

The Artful Dodger, guiding the innocent Oliver to the den of Fagin the Jew, would have introduced that last New Zealander to the sordid section of London about Great Saffron Hill and Little Saffron Hill that existed before the construction of the Holborn Viaduct.  In the pages of Thackeray and George Meredith he would have studied the West-End of Victorian days.  Certain seamy aspects of London life of the last years of the nineteenth century would have been revealed in the novels of George Gissing; and the books of a score of scribes, whose permanent place in letters is still a matter of conjecture, would have flashed glimpses of the city’s streets, foibles, manners, and emotions in the early years of the twentieth century.

Our literature has, as yet, given us no figure analogous to that Last New Zealander of Macaulay.  But in the bustling New York of fifty or one hundred years hence the dreamer or the student wishing to feel how the inhabitants of Manhattan lived three or four score years ago, or how we are living today, will not disdain to turn over pages originally designed to lighten the tedium of idle hours.

Now and again, in the novels of the fifties and sixties, there are glimpses of the stretch from Washington Square to Fourteenth Street, but the greater Fifth Avenue, as a factor in fiction, dates from about the time when Daisy Miller became a type.  To those who really understand them, every one of the great, vital streets of the world has a soul as well as a body.  The social invader from the West, the merchant whose establishment still found profit in Grand Street, the banker from Broad Street, or the ship’s chandler from South, the club awakening to the fact that its quarters on Broadway or in one of the side streets near Irving Place was too far downtown, or in size inadequate to its growing membership—­those were the agencies that wrought the Avenue’s material development.  But it was the American travelling in Europe in the days when we first found Henry James’s heroine on the shores of Lake Geneva and later in Rome, when transatlantic voyagers were not so commonplace as they became later, whose pangs of homesickness in his pension in the Rue de Clichy in Paris, or his hotel in Sorrento, first invested Fifth Avenue with a spirit.  It was different perhaps when he returned home with a slight pose of foreign manners, to bask for a brief moment in the sunny flood of distinction that was due him as a kind of later Sir John Franklin.  But over there what were cathedral naves and spires, or art galleries, or purple Mediterranean waves, or laboriously acquired French verbs, to the jutting brown-stone stoops and the maples breaking into blossom?