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“Would you reap anew the fruits of the Teutonic invasion, you need only observe how it has brought force and endurance, solidity and creature comfort, family affection and social sentiment, good humor and good sense, to New York, as it did to Rome. The city would not be itself, without its delicatessen shops or its Christmas trees; much less without German scholarship or German music—Wagner and Beethoven having become ours even more than Berlin’s.

“Or, if you prefer oil to butter,—that is, are Latin rather than Teutonic in temper,—you may cultivate your mood by a morning with the tower of Madison Square Garden, which is a copy of the Giralda at Seville, and an afternoon in the new Hispanic Museum in Audubon Park. For mediaeval Italy you need but read your Dante in the Church of the Paulist Fathers. For the Renaissance, as for the Gothic, you may study the architecture of any one of a score of our public buildings, or the sculpture and painting in the Metropolitan Museum. Rome itself has now no more Italian citizens than New York, and it hears far less Italian music. While as for French music, French art, French cookery, and French amenity—we have appropriated them as thoroughly as we have the name Lafayette. Our rich men imitate French châteaux; the rest of us bless or revile the French invention of the apartment house.