William Hepworth Dixon, White Conquest: Volume 2

[295] edifices as Girard's College, the most perfect classical building in America, or of the new Girard bridge, over the Schuylkill River — the widest, perhaps the handsomest, iron roadway in the world --but of ordinary structures-clubs and banks, churches and law-courts, masonic halls, hotels, and newspaper offices. Two or three of the new banks are equal to the best things lately done in Lombard Street, while the great Masonic Temple puts the residence of our own Grand Lodge to shame. The new churches are mostly in good style and rich material, nearly all being faced with either rough green-stone or polished white marble. The new buildings of the University of Pennsylvania-partly completed — are fine in exterior, built of the rough green-stone peculiar to the .place, faced with red sand-stone, as well as rich in apparatus and collections, the department of physics being particularly good.

Broad Street is not yet a rival of Pall Mall, but Penn Square is both larger and better built than St. James's Square. Market Street is not yet equal to the Strand, but Chestnut Street is not unworthy to rank with Cheapside; and in a few years the business