THE CITY 'OF WASHINGTON.

Timaru Herald, Volume I, Issue 5, 9 July 1864, Page 2

THE CITY 'OF WASHINGTON.

The following graphic description of the city of Washington is by Mr. A. Sala, the well-known novelist : — I Lave been endeavouring many hours, but with indifferent success, to determine m my own mind what Washington is like. That it resembles, m 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 cotttre 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 transf erred to the great desert of Sahara, and called a Capitol. There is a perpetual solution of continuity at Washington. There is no cohesion about Pennsylvania avenue ; its houses are as Hudibras's -story of the bear and the fiddle — begun and broke off m the middle. It is an architectural conundrum which nobody can guess, and m which I candidly believe there is no meaning. The Vitruviuses and Palladios 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 m 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 sets m ; the builders abandon the work, "but, nothing disheartened, erect three or four stories of fresh houses elsewhere. It is said of those 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 acts without any catastrophes. It presents a converse to Mercutio's description of his wound : its avenues are as deep as wells, and its blocks as wide as church doors ; but they do not serve any purpose that lam aware of. Washington |will be, when completed, the most magnificent city on this side the Atlantic, but it is not quite begun yet. We arc 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 ass never goes up. Only two hundred million of dollars inorc, 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 giver, to use the diction of Mr. Artemus Ward, tc manglorious and spanglorious" appellatives. Pendente lite, Washington doesn't precisely lan- j guish, but it wallows m the dust like an eel iv a sand-basket, 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 ; hut at present it is not anything. It is m 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 Brobdignag. 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 Highgate out of its wits, and a spice of Barnet at the Jair time— for ragged horse-flesh is here abundant —the whole mingled with Holborn Hill and set m the midst of Salisbury Plains. After this imagine a toho-bohu 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, ladies m crinoline?, and loofcrs m "sit on 'em" hats, and the very faintest notion of Washington may begin to dawn upon you. WUlard'a Hotel, notwithstanding, is a wonderful place. Opinions may differ as to the amount of personal comfort to be obtained there, and it is no means rare to hear j 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 omniverous lodginghouse cat is an animal happily unknown to the Buttons and Cuviers of the States. To keep an Lotel, indeed, or a hotel, as grammatical precisians on this side insist on its 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 m a country where nine out of every ten individuals you meet are presumedly remarkable and confessedly important. You may keft> a boarding house, 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 m the same vocation would do; but you rausn't let lodgings-nit 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 Magaera who lives on her lodger, Willard's becomes m most cases, Hobson's choice. " 1 have stayed at Willard's for twenty years," an acquaintance recently remarked, "and for twenty years I have declared 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 exportation, the scramble for eatables, and the struggle for drinkables, precisely as you happen to be a philosopher or otherwise. After all, it is some thing to be continually jostlling senators m 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 m many instances marks American society ; for neither senator nor re. preseutative, governor of State, nor general m 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 m the dry goods line, or the poorest suitor for Government employment, who has come up to Washington i with the hope of getting a consulate, and woidd I be glad to get a lighthouse.