But these were minor defects in an establishment which had many merits, and was mainly of the temperament and intention of the large English railroad hotels.  They looked from their windows down into a gardened square, peopled with a full share of the superabounding statues of Berlin and frequented by babies and nurse maids who seemed not to mind the cold any more than the stone kings and generals.  The aspect of this square, like the excellent cooking of the hotel and the architecture of the imperial capital, suggested the superior civilization of Paris.  Even the rows of gray houses and private palaces of Berlin are in the French taste, which is the only taste there is in Berlin.  The suggestion of Paris is constant, but it is of Paris in exile, and without the chic which the city wears in its native air.  The crowd lacks this as much as the architecture and the sculpture; there is no distinction among the men except for now and then a military figure, and among the women no style such as relieves the commonplace rash of the New York streets.  The Berliners are plain and ill dressed, both men and women, and even the little children are plain.  Every one is ill dressed, but no one is ragged, and among the undersized homely folk of the lower classes there is no such poverty-stricken shabbiness as shocks and insults the sight in New York.  That which distinctly recalls our metropolis is the lofty passage of the elevated trains intersecting the prospectives of many streets; but in Berlin the elevated road is carried on massive brick archways and not lifted upon gay, crazy iron ladders like ours.

When you look away from this, and regard Berlin on its aesthetic, side you are again in that banished Paris, whose captive art-soul is made to serve, so far as it may be enslaved to such an effect, in the celebration of the German triumph over France.  Berlin has never the presence of a great capital, however, in spite of its perpetual monumental insistence.  There is no streaming movement in broad vistas; the dull looking population moves sluggishly; there is no show of fine equipages.  The prevailing tone of the city and the sky is gray; but under the cloudy heaven there is no responsive Gothic solemnity in the architecture.  There are hints of the older German cities in some of the remote and observe streets, but otherwise all is as new as Boston, which in fact the actual Berlin hardly antedates.

There are easily more statues in Berlin than in any other city in the world, but they only unite in failing to give Berlin an artistic air.  They stand in long rows on the cornices; they crowd the pediments; they poise on one leg above domes and arches; they shelter themselves in niches; they ride about on horseback; they sit or lounge on street corners or in garden walks; all with a mediocrity in the older sort which fails of any impression.  If they were only furiously baroque they would be something, and it may be from a sense of this that there is a self-assertion in