Foster’s Praeteritio

At the end of my first post on Irving for vWNY, I cited the author’s description of New York as a “great crowded metropolis, so full of life[,] bustle, noise, shew and splendour,” so changed from the “quiet little City” of his youth. “It is really now,” Irving wrote to his sister, “one of the most rucketing cities in the world and reminds me of one of the great European cities (Frankfort for instance) in the time of an annual fair