CHAPTER IX.
_Fifth Avenue in Fiction_ Fifth Avenue in Fiction--Pages of Romance--The Henry James Heroes and Heroines--George William Curtiss's "Prue and I"-- Edgar Fawcett and Edgar Saltus--The "Big Four" of Archibald Clavering Gunter--The Home of Dr.
Sloper--O.

Henry and Arthur Train--Bunner and Washington Square--"Predestined"-- The De Rham House and Van Bibber's Burglar--Delmonico's--The "Amen Corner"-- Union and Madison Squares--The Coming of Potash and Perlmutter--Up the Avenue.
To Macaulay's New Zealander, contemplating from London Bridge the ruins of St.Paul's, and the miles upon miles of silent stones stretching to north and west and east, there would undoubtedly have come the desire to reconstruct a mental picture of the vast, dead city in certain of the various periods in which it had been teeming and throbbing with human life.

Had the wish become the task, formal history would have played its part.

Informal history would have proved more fruitful, and bygone days would have taken shape in the study of old prints, letters, and diaries.
But for the full flavour of the town that once was and now had become crumbling dust he would have turned to pages that had been professedly pages of romance.
Suppose Elizabethan London had been his especial interest.

That he would have seen through the eyes of Sir John Falstaff and his riotous, dissolute cronies of the Boar's Head Tavern.