No stint of omnibuses here! Half-a-dozen have gone by
within as many minutes. Plenty of hackney cabs and coaches too;
gigs, phaetons, large-wheeled tilburies, and private carriages -
rather of a clumsy make, and not very different from the public
vehicles, but built for the heavy roads beyond the city pavement.
Negro coachmen and white; in straw hats, black hats, white hats,
glazed caps, fur caps; in coats of drab, black, brown, green, blue,
nankeen, striped jean and linen; and there, in that one instance
(look while it passes, or it will be too late), in suits of livery.
Some southern republican that, who puts his blacks in uniform, and
swells with Sultan pomp and power. Yonder, where that phaeton with
the well-clipped pair of grays has stopped - standing at their
heads now - is a Yorkshire groom, who has not been very long in
these parts, and looks sorrowfully round for a companion pair of
top-boots, which he may traverse the city half a year without
meeting. Heaven save the ladies, how they dress! We have seen
more colours in these ten minutes, than we should have seen
elsewhere, in as many days. What various parasols! what rainbow
silks and satins! what pinking of thin stockings, and pinching of
thin shoes, and fluttering of ribbons and silk tassels, and display
of rich cloaks with gaudy hoods and linings! The young gentlemen
are fond, you see, of turning down their shirt-collars and
cultivating their whiskers, especially under the chin; but they
cannot approach the ladies in their dress or bearing, being, to say
the truth, humanity of quite another sort.
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