DESCRIPTION OF THE CITY OF WASHINGTON.

Lyttelton Times, Volume XXI, Issue 1233, 10 May 1864, Page 3

DESCRIPTION OF THE CITY OF WASHINGTON.

Augustus Sala, the " Special Commissioner " of the London Daily Telegraph, thus graphically describes the city of Washington:—

I have been endeavoring many hours, but with indifferent success to determine in my own mind what Washington is like. That it resembles in any way the metropolis of a great, powerful, and wealthy commonwealth can at once, without much fear of contradiction, be denied. It contains, certainly, some notable public buildings, but they are scattered far and wide, with all kinds of incongruous environments, producing upon the stranger a perplexed impression that the British Museum has suddenly migrated to the centre of an exhausted brickfield, where rubbish may be shot; or that St. Paul's Cathedral, washed quite white, and stuck upon stone stilts, has been transferred to the centre of the great desert of Sahara, and called a Capitol. There is a perpetual solution of continuity at Washington. There is no cohesion a.bout Pennsylvania avenue; its houses are as Hudibras's story of the bear and the fiddle—begun and broke off in the middle. It is an architectural conundrum which nobody can guess, and in which I candidly believe there is no meaning. The Vitruviuses and Palbulios of America have perpetrated a vast practical joke, and called it Washington. There is no beginning, no centre, and no end to Washington. It is the most bogus of towns—a shin-plaster in bricks and mortar and marble. The people seem to be very fond of building houses, but when they have run up three or four stories which threaten to attain the altitude of the Tower of Babel, the confusion of tongues set in; the builders abandon their work, but, nothing disheartened, erect three or four stories of fresh houses elsewhere. It is snid of these patrons of the drama who habitually avail themselves of half-price, that they have seen nothing but denouements. Washington, on the contrary, is a collection of first acta

without any ca( as implies. It presents a converse to Mereutio's description of his wound; its avenues are us deep as wells, and its blocks as wide as church doors; but they do not serve any purpose that I ain aware of. Washington will be, when completed, the most magnificent city on this side the Atlantic, but it is not quite begun yet. We are still at the soup and fish, and have not got to the first entree. Never was there so interminable an overture. " Two piastres more," cries the Arab funambulist, unworthily parodied by the London street mountebank, "and the ass shall ascend the ladder." But those piastres are never forthcoming and the donkey never goes up. Only two hundred millions of dollars more, and two hundred thousand inhabitants, and Washington would be able to rival, the Empire City and the Crescent City, and all the other cities to which the Americans hAve given, to use the diction of Mr. Artemus Ward " manglorious and spanglorious" appellatives. Pendente lite, Washington doesn't precisely languish but it wallows in the dust like an eel in a sandbasket, delicious when fried or stewed, but slightly repulsive to the sight before he is skinned and cooked. Washington will be, I have no doubt, some day uproariously splendid; but at present it isn't anything. It is in the District of Columbia and the State of the Future. And yet I must, for the sake of those who will never probably visit this rambling mass of streets without houses and houses without streets, liken it to something. Well, it is like a jumbled-up collection of children's toy villages seen through the opera glass of the King of Brobdingnag. Again, it is not unlike the Old Kent Road, grown out of all patience. Stay, it is like Brentford run mad, with a dash of llighgate out of its wits and a spice of Barnet at the fair time—for ragged horseflesh is here abundant—the whole mingled with Holborn Hill and set in the midst of Salisbury Plains. After this imagine a tohobohu of Canterbury Halls and dancing saloons, government offices and old clothes' shops, Bath and Cheltenham private mansions and log cabins, oysters, negroes, lagerbeer, mules, oxen, waggons, dragoons, ladies in crinolines and loafers in " sit on 'em " hats and the very faintest notion of Washington may begin to dawn upon you. Willard's Hotel, notwithstanding, is a wonderful place. Opinions may differ as to the amount of personal comfort to be obtained there, and it is by no means rare to hear Americans assert the preferability of private lodgings over the huge, noisy, caravanserai of Congressopolis. There is a drawback, however, to giving practical effect to such a preference, inasmuch as private apartments are all but impossible to procure. Our cousins are not a lodging-letting people. Mrs. Lirriper would not be at home here. The omnivorous lodging-house cat is an animal happily unknown to the BufEons and Cuviers of the States. To keep an hotel, indeed, or a hotel, as grammatical precisians on this side persist on the word being pronounced, is accounted a grand, wise and beautiful thing; and next to the President of the United States, the commander of the army of the Potomac, the conductor of a railway car, and the editor of the New York Knuckleduster, I have very little doubt that an hotel keeper is about as remarkable and important a personage as can be met with in a country where nine out of every ten individuals you meet are presumedly remarkable and confessedly important. You may keep a boardinghouse, too, without derogating to any great extent from your dignity; although, as a rule, a lady who takes boarders commands more respect than a man engaged in the same vocation would do; but you musn't let lodgings—it is "mean;" and, above all human frailties, the Americans, to their honor, abhor meanness. Thus, failing furnished lodgings and a " man of the house," or, worse still, a Megaera who lives on her lodgers, Willard's becomes in most cases Hobson's choice. "I have stayed at Willard's for twenty years," an acquaintance recently remarked, "and for twenty years I have declared that I would never go to Willard's again." There are two or three most ostensibly first-class hotels, but virtually there is but one step from Willard's to the most comfortless and the groggiest taverns. So you go to Willard's and grumble, or else grin, shrug your shoulders, and bear the heat, the noise, the dust, the smoke, the expectoration, the scramble for eatables, and the struggle for drinkables, precisely as you happen to be a philosopher, or otherwise. After all, it is something to be continually jostling senators in the hall and members of the House of Representatives on the staircases. You can scarcely fail either to gain some salutary insight into the practical equality which in many instances marks American society; for neither senator nor representative, governor of State, nor general in the army, millionaire, merchant, nor roving English dandy, is a bit better off or treated with one whit more deference at Willard's, than the roughest specimen of a bagman in the dry goods line, or the who has come up to Washington with the hope of getting a consulate and would be glad to get a lighthouse.