Waterbury Evening Democrat

QUAINT BRUSSELS.
Peculiarities of the Capital of the Little Kingdom of Belgium.
Brussels is a showy, geometrically built city, says Harper's Weekly, with endless straight avenues, cubic perspectives, and well-ordered suburbs; a young and laughing capital vulgarized by its imitation of every other capital, and which an immoderate love of stucco has led to the imitation of Paris in particular; a modernized town laid out by rule, scraped clean with pumice stone, deprived of all the bric-a-brac of its antiquities, rebuilt without any of its primitive originality; a town which has sprung forth from the vitals of its ancient quarters with ready-made squares, symmetrical thoroughfares, straight streets, stucco and bastard-stucco buildings, five-storied houses, all the usual topographical peculiarities of Europeanism; a town which has laid aside its ancient robes, crumbled to dust its antique plaster work, pulverized its venerable relics, cleaned out its sewers, aerified its sinks, desquamated its ulcers, to make itself like other towns; a town of palaces, barracks, academies and official buildings, in which is concentrated all the machinery of government, and which is the very heart of the body politic; a town which, with its sparse population, altogether insufficient to people its wide thoroughfares, and with its somewhat paralyzing condition of well being, its ostentatious luxury and wealth, calls up a vision of another La Haye-a purring, self-satisfied, quiet, satiated, much-envied place; a town which has retained its bourgeois character with all its pomp-a matter-of-fact, home-like, punctilious city; a town inhabited by men of simple manners and moderate intellectual power, combined with a weakness for trivial amusements and military pomp and show; yet, with it all, still remaining a very paradise to those who like to lead an easy, careless life.