274- Ne'vo Market of Covent Garden. 



or, in other words, of civilisation, which has since gradually 

 developed itself, and produced in towns and cities, market- 

 places, piers, quays, exchanges, and other public buildings. 

 These erections were at jfirst merely useful, but by degrees 

 were constructed so as to combine beauty and character with 

 the requisite convenience. As commercial towns and cities 

 increased, churches, convents, palaces, and fortified castles 

 diminished; the architectural splendour of the latter being 

 gradually transferred to the former. Wealth, which had here- 

 tofore consisted chiefly in the possession of lands and vassals, 

 now began to accumulate in the coffers of commercial men ; 

 and these, like the others, naturally sought to employ their 

 riches in buildings calculated to further their own pursuits. 

 Such have been the effects of the principle of commerce or 

 civilisation. It might easily be shown that the continued 

 operation of this principle, aided, as it soon will be, by the 

 general diffusion of useful knowledge and rational taste, will 

 end in almost the only magnificent buildings being public 

 ones, and in the total disappearance of temporary hovels, 

 whether as commercial or agricultural structures or private 

 dwellings, and of palaces and castles, except as ruins. No 

 cathedrals and convents, and but few private castles and 

 palaces, similar to those of Europe, will ever be erected in 

 America ; but such market-places, colleges for education, 

 parochial institutions, and public gardens, will be erected in 

 that rising country as it accumulates wealth, as, in point of 

 real grandeur and beauty, founded on utility, have never yet 

 been surpassed. We shall not, however, permit ourselves here 

 to indulge in such speculations. 



As contemporaneous buildings of the same class as Covent 

 Garden Market, we may notice some other very handsome 

 erections in foreign countries, the work of the end of the last 

 or the commencement of the present century. The first are 

 the bazaars of Moscow and Petersburgh, which are large 

 quadrangular buildings, enclosing an open square used as a 

 market, and surrounded exteriorly with open colonnades or 

 arcades like those on the north and south sides of Covent 

 Garden Market ; and under these colonnades are shops with 

 rooms over, exactly like those which have been described. 

 The Exchange of St. Petersburgh is also a remarkably hand- 

 some building, only surpassed by that of Paris, which is the 

 handsomest work of the kind, we believe, on the Continent. 

 The only commercial building in London which ranked with 

 these, previously to the commencement of the present cen- 

 tury, was Gresham's Royal Exchange ; the work of an indi- 

 vidual ; and as great an effort, relatively to the times in 



