I found the modern churches, of various denominations, certainly better, as works of architecture, than I had expected.  They may quite stand beside the average of modern churches in England, setting aside a few of the very best....  But I thought the churches, whose style is most commonly Gothic of one kind or another, decidedly less successful than some of the civil buildings.  In some of these, I hardly know how far by choice, how far by happy accident, a style has been hit upon which seemed to me far more at home than any of the reproductions of Gothic.  Much of the street architecture of several cities has very successfully caught the leading idea of the true Italian style.

New York, the gateway to America for, perhaps, nine out of ten visitors, is described by Mr. Richard Grant White, the American writer, as “the dashing, dirty, demi-rep of cities.”  Mr. Joaquin Miller, the poet of the Sierras, calls it “an iron-fronted, iron-footed, and iron-hearted town.”  Miss Florence Marryat asserts that New York is “without any exception the most charming city she has ever been in.”  Miss Emily Faithful admits that at first it seems rough and new, but says that when one returns to it from the West, one recognises that it has everything essential in common with his European experiences.  In my own note-book I find that New York impressed me as being “like a lady in ball costume, with diamonds in her ears, and her toes out at her boots.”

Here, then, is evidence that New York makes a pretty strong impression on her guests, and that this impression is not by any means the same in every case.  New York is evidently a person of character, and of a character with many facets.  To most European visitors it must, on the whole, be somewhat of a disappointment; and it is not really an advantageous or even a characteristic portal to the American continent.  For one thing, it is too overwhelmingly cosmopolitan in the composition of its population to strike the distinctive American note.  It is not alone that New York society imitates that of France and England in a more pronounced way than I found anywhere else in America, but the names one sees over the shops seem predominantly German and Jewish, accents we are familiar with at home resound in our ears, the quarters we are first introduced to recall the dinginess and shabbiness of the waterside quarters of cities like London and Glasgow.  More intimate acquaintance finds much that is strongly American in New York; but this is not the first impression, and first impressions count for so much that it seems to me a pity that New York is for most travellers the prologue to their American experiences.