Gotham

“ NUMBER ONE. “Each to his taste,” somebody says: so say I: so says Gotham. Look at that splendid house, with its massive door-way, its mammoth plate-glass windows, its tasteful conservatory, where the snowy Orange-blossom, and clustering Rose, and crimson Cactus, and regal Passion-flower, and fragrant Heliotrope breathe out their little day of sweetness. ”

“ Then the sheriff rode on with his men; but every one that they met was doing some silly thing.
"Truly I believe that the people of Gotham are all fools," said one of the horsemen.
"That is true," said another. "It would be a shame to harm such simple people."
"Let us ride back to London, and tell the king all about them," said the sheriff.
"Yes, let us do so," said the horsemen.
So they went back, and told the king that Gotham was a town of fools; and the king laughed, and said that if that was the case, he would not harm them, but would let them keep their noses. ”

“ One day, news was brought to Gotham that the king was coming that way, and that he would pass through the town. This did not please the men of Gotham at all. They hated the king, for they knew that he was a cruel, bad man. If he came to their town, they would have to find food and lodg-ing for him and his men ”

“ Yet, despite its swarming streets and crowded shops, ceaselessly thronged with men and women eagerly hurrying here and there in the pursuit of business or elusive pleasure, all chattering, laughing, shouting amid the deafening, multisonous roar of traffic incidental to Gotham's daily life, there is one part of the great metropolis where there is no bustle, no noise, no crowd, where the streets are empty even in daytime, where a passer-by is a curiosity and a child a phenomenon. ”

“ NEW YORK. “There is no night there,” though spoken of a place the opposite of New York, is nevertheless true of Gotham; for by the time the ennuied pleasure seekers have yawned out the evening at the theater or opera, and supped at Taylor’s, or danced themselves lame at some private ball, a more humble but much more useful portion of the community are rubbing open their eyelids, and creeping by the waning light of the street lamps, and the gray dawn, to another brave day of ill-requited toil ”

“ The place was beginning to be crowded, but there was a table on the Fifth Avenue side.
As they crossed the crowded room toward it, women looked up at Elorn Sharrow, instantly aware that they saw perfection in hat, gown and fur, and a face and figure not to be mistaken for any imitation of the Gotham type.
She wore silver fox––just a stole and muff. Every feminine eye realised their worth. ”

“ The third canto delivers the rules by which he, King Churchill, who purposes being the father of his people, designs to govern his own reign. That is all. What and where is Gotham? What is the meaning of this royalty with which the poet invests himself? What is the drift, scope, and unity of the poem? Gotham is not, and is, England. It is not England, for he tells us in the poem that he is born in England, and that he is not born in Gotham ”

“ What a delicious little bit of nature amidst this fossil-hearted Gotham!
How true—how beautiful the words of Holy Writ! “Better is a dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred therewith.”
What an immensely tall man! he looks like a barber’s pole in those serpentine pants. Why does he make those gyrations? Why does he beckon that short man to his side? Well, I declare! everything comical comes to my net! He has taken out a slip of paper, and using the short man’s head for a writing-desk, is scribbling off some directions for a porter in waiting! ”

“ Just then another man of Gotham came from the market with a sack of meal on his horse. He heard his neigh-bors quar-rel-ing about sheep; but he could see no sheep between them, and so he stopped and spoke to them.
"Ah, you foolish fellows!" he cried. "It is strange that you will never learn wisdom.—Come here, Peter, and help me lay my sack on my shoul-der." ”

“ She had not lived the best of lives, this old hag, toothless and decrepit in her hovel, where her couch was rags and the walls grimy and almost black; she had been a fence and what not, and there were stories about her that made people even in that delectable quarter of Gotham shake their heads over them.
She had died in the night.
Death had come to the hovel in the wee sma’ hours of the darkness, when the great city was supposed to sleep the sleep of the innocent and righteous; but somehow or other there was a suspicion that a human hand had helped Mother Flintstone out of the world. ”

“ Mr Saltzburg lowered the baton which he had stretched quivering towards the roof and sat down and mopped his forehead. The curtain fell on the first act of “The Rose of America,” and simultaneously tremendous applause broke out from all over the Gotham Theatre, which was crammed from floor to roof with that heterogeneous collection of humanity which makes up the audience of a New York opening performance. The applause continued like the breaking of waves on a stony beach. The curtain rose and fell, rose and fell, rose and fell again. ”

“ The story is that King John intended to live in the neighbourhood, but that the villagers, foreseeing ruin as the cost of supporting the court, feigned imbecility when the royal messengers arrived. Wherever the latter went they saw the rustics engaged in some absurd task. John, on this report, determined to have his hunting lodge elsewhere, and the “wise men” boasted, “we ween there are more fools pass through Gotham than remain in it.” The “foles of Gotham” are mentioned as early as the 15th century in the Towneley Mysteries ”

“ The girl’s silence, too, perplexed them; they were accustomed to gabble, to noise, to jazz, vocal and instrumental, to that incessant metropolitan clamour which fills every second with sound in a city whose only distinction is its din. Stage, press, art, letters, social existence unless noisy mean nothing in Gotham; reticence, leisure, repose are the three lost arts. The megaphone is the city’s symbol ”

“ Look, Miss Earl! Yonder, in the box directly opposite, is the celebrated Sir Roger Percival, the English nobleman about whom all Gotham is running mad. If he has not more sense than most men of his age, his head will be completely turned by the flattery heaped upon him. What a commentary on Republican Americans, that we are so dazzled by the glitter of a title! However, he really is very agreeable; I have met him several times, dined with him last week at the Coltons. He has been watching us for some minutes. Ah! there is a bow for me; and one I presume for you, Mr. Manning. ”

“ A middle-aged man with a keen nose and a snapping eye asked permission to share the benefit of his treasures of journalism. As the middle-aged man glanced over the New-York dailies, he ventured an anathema upon the abominations of Gotham.
The patriotic pride of a genuine New-Yorker never deserts him. Lorrimer discovered that the maligner of his city was a Bostonian, and a stormy debate ensued. ”

“ Since the time when Mary Rogers, the beautiful cigar girl of Broadway, met her sad fate over in Hoboken, the pretty shop girls of New York have contributed more than their full quota to the city's contemporaneous history. They have figured in connection with many of its social romances and domestic infelicities, as well as with its scandals and its crimes—secret and revealed. In Gotham's grave and gay aspects—in its comedy, its tragedy, and its melo-drama, we are perpetually running across the charming face, graceful form, and easy, gay demeanor of the pretty shop girl. ”

“ Once upon a time the men of Gotham would have kept the Cuckoo so that she might sing all the year, and in the midst of their town they made a hedge round in compass and they got a Cuckoo, and put her into it, and said, "Sing there all through the year, or thou shalt have neither meat nor water." ”

“ But when Hazel caught up the basket and ran off to her little corner room, then Gotham did betake himself to the library, though without quite the report suggested.
'Beg pardon, sir,' he said; 'Miss 'Azel 'ave just received a bushel of flowers, sir,—if you choose to be h'aware, sir.'
'A what, Gotham?' said the astonished Mr. Falkirk.
'No person of discretion to detain them at the 'ouse, sir, and so of course they followed Miss 'Azel down 'ere, sir. Boukets enough to last a h'ordinary person all summer, sir. And cards. And ribbands,'—concluded Gotham, beginning to clear the table for tea. ”

“ Pugilism was the fashion with the young bloods of Gotham at that time, especially such of them as had any tendency to politics: and among these boys of nineteen, there were not a few who would have tackled a fancy man in his prime, and at no great odds either, their great agility making up for their want of downright strength. ”

“ Be content, for if thou do live until the next year, thou wilt be a foul sow." "Walk, knave, walk!" said she; "for if thou live till the next year, thou wilt be a stark knave, a lubber, and a fool."
It is very evident that the men of Gotham were of "honest" Jack Falstaff's opinion that the better part of valour is discretion: On a time there was a man of Gotham a-mowing in the meads and found a great grasshopper. He cast down his scythe, and did run home to his neighbours, and said that there was a devil in the field that hopped in the grass. ”

“ Which doctrines were no sooner made known than a storm of rage and indignation against Ænesidemus burst forth in Gotham, and not only was his tub of fumifical philosophy at once declared vacant, but its very bottom was knocked out by the students, by which it became yet more vacant, and wholly unfit for professorial purposes. Ænesidemus was further declared to be tainted with the worst errors of Gulielmus de Læto Lapide, the Pope, and the Caucus; and within a short space of time Gotham knew him no more, save as a Radical and a backslider, who had bitten the bosom that cherished him. ”

“ The Monday morning papers, indeed, gave thrilling account of the heroism of Private George Lawton in capturing at the risk of his life a daring young rebel officer of the famous Black Horse Cavalry. Then there were details of Lawton's prospective promotion, and of the general's complimentary remarks, and Monday morning's papers teemed, too, with tremendous tales of battle, and all Gotham cheered itself hoarse over the vivid reports of the annihilation of the rebel cavalry by the terrific fighters of the Fire Zouaves. ”

“ See my List of Incidents under the titles, "One cheese after another," "Hare postman," "Not counting self," "Drowning eels." In most cases Mr. Clouston quotes Eastern analogies.
Remarks.—All countries have their special crop of fools, Boeotians among the Greeks, the people of Hums among the Persians (how appropriate!) , the Schildburgers in Germany, and so on. Gotham is the English representative, and as witticisms call to mind well-known wits, so Gotham has had heaped on its head all the stupidities of the Indo-European world. ”

“ And all the while he held forth about literature and its true purpose; about what art really is; [136] about his own art, his own literature, and his own self.
And the girl was really fascinated.
She had seen, at a distance, such men. When Brown had named himself to her, she had recognised the name with awe, as a fashionable and wealthy name known to Gotham. ”

“ And, turn me where I will, distraction meets.
O my brave fellows! great in arts and arms,
The wonder of the earth, whom glory warms 330
To high achievements; can your spirits bend,
Through base control (ye never can descend
So low by choice) to wear a tyrant's chain,
Or let, in Freedom's seat, a Stuart reign?
If Fame, who hath for ages, far and wide,
Spread in all realms the cowardice, the pride,
The tyranny and falsehood of those lords,
Contents you not, search England's fair records;
England, where first the breath of life I drew,
Where, next to Gotham, my best love is due ”

“ At length, after a host of mishaps, including some [37] interesting but unpleasant submarine explorations in an unusually large mud-hole into which he fell full-length, he arrived, soaked and savage, at the house of Madame Prewster.
This elderly and interesting lady has long been an oily pilgrim in this vale of tears. The oldest inhabitant cannot remember the exact period when this truly great prophetess became a fixture in Gotham, and began to earn her bread and butter by fortune-telling and kindred occupations. ”

“ If some of the last-cited stories are not precisely Gothamite drolleries, though all are droll enough in their way, there can be no doubt whatever that we have a Sinhalese brother to the men of Gotham in the following: A villager in Ceylon, whose calf had got its head into a pot and could not get it out again, sent for a friend, celebrated for his wisdom, to release the poor animal. ”

“ It is indeed, by selecting the fine church, possible to make an illustration of Gotham that shall not be commonplace; and the interior, being in part Transitional Norman, is even finer than the exterior. ”

“ Burt enthusiasttically slapped his thigh.
“The finest girl in Gotham!” he announced forcefully. “Just that. If I were twenty years younger I'd chase you out of here right now and go to dreaming of making a fortune to let her kick around for me. She's Dick Blake's girl.” ”

“ Things seemed to be going on about as usual in Gotham, and the remainder of the United States: the markets appeared to be good; whisky, cotton and iron were quoted at fair figures: while the usual healthy number of fires, accidents and murders were reported in the proper columns. ”