The notes of old travellers best revive the scene ere it was lost in modern improvements.  Mrs. Knight, who visited New York in 1704, having performed the journey from Boston all the way on horseback, enjoyed the “vendues” at Manhattan, where “they gave drinks”; was surprised to see “fireplaces that had no jambs” and “bricks of divers colors and laid in checkers, being glazed and looking very agreeable.”  The diversion in vogue was “riding in sleighs about four miles out of town, where they have a house of entertainment at a place called the Bowery.”  In 1769 Dr. Burnaby recognized but two churches, Trinity and St. George, and “went in an Italian chaise to a turtle feast on the East River.”  In 1788, Brissot found that the session of Congress there gave great eclat to New York, but, with republican indignation, he laments the ravages of luxury and the English fashions visible in Broadway,—­“silks, gauzes, hats, and borrowed hair;... equipages rare, but elegant.”  “The men,” he adds, “have more simplicity of dress; they disdain gewgaws; but they take their revenge in the luxury of the table";—­“and luxury,” he observes, “forms a class dangerous to society,—­I mean bachelors,—­the expense of women causing matrimony to be dreaded by men.”  It is curious to find the French radical of eighty years ago drawing from the life of Broadway inferences similar to those of the even more emphatic economical moralist of to-day.  In 1794, Wansey, a commercial traveller, found the “Tontine near the Battery” the most eligible hotel, and met there Dr. Priestley, breakfasted with Gates, and had a call from Livingston; saw “some good paintings by Trumbull, at the Federal Hall,” and Hodgkinson, at the theatre, in “A Bold Stroke for a Husband”; dined with Comfort Sands; and Mr. Jay, “brother to the Ambassador,” took him to tea at the “Indian Queen";—­items of information that mark the social and political transition since the days of Dutch rule, though the Battery still remained the court end and nucleus of Manhattan.

But it is not local memory alone that the solitude of Broadway awakens in our aged guide; the vacant walk is peopled, to his fancy, with the celebrities of the past whom he has there gazed at or greeted,—­Franklin, Jay, Tom Paine, Schuyler, Cobbett, Freneau, and Colonel Trumbull, with their Revolutionary prestige; Volney and Genet, with the memory of French radicalism; Da Ponte and the old Italian opera; Colles and Clinton and the Erie Canal days; Red Jacket and the aborigines; Dunlap and Dennie, the literary pioneers; Cooke, Kemble, Kean, Matthews, and Macready, followed so eagerly by urchin eyes,—­the immortal heroes of the stage; Hamilton, Clinton, Morris, Burr, Gallatin, and a score of political and civic luminaries whose names have passed into history; Decatur, Hull, Perry, and the brilliant throng of victorious naval officers grouped near the old City Hotel; Moreau, Louis Philippe, Talleyrand, Louis Napoleon, Maroncelli, Foresti, Kossuth,