PRIVILEGED SEATS.

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must conceal his wealth to escape persecution. We are yet to learn that in liberal America a citizen is not free to spend his money as he pleases, glove himself to his fancy, wear his beard to his liking, choose whom he likes, or whom he can, for friends and acquaintances, and purchase whatever is for sale in the way of opportunities for public amusement. And yet to show how such matters may be, see how it was in England only a hundred and fifty years ago! Reresby in his Historical Memoranda, and under date of 1685, says:

"Gentlemen were now in a most unprecedented manner assaulted in the very streets; one had a powder thrown into his eyes which deprived him of sight; another had his throat cut by two men, though neither of these gentlemen had given the least visible provocation or offence to the aggressors."

Civilization is too far advanced, and we repeat America too liberal to allow of any proscription of a class, high or low, for reasons not connected with law or morals. Were it otherwise, the country would very soon feel it, for a man would stay here but to make a fortune, and go to a more refined and liberal land to enjoy it. Still, however, there are offences of one class against, another of the rich by the poor and of the poor by the rich-and as these occur principally in public places where people should meet upon a common footing as to purchase and privilege, the Managers are bound to see that the arrangements are republican and inoffensive. "Exclusiveness," unpopular as it is, is a republican right, subject to nothing but ridicule, when exercised in a man's house, equipage, and personal acquaintance; but any privilege given, in a place of amusement, to one man above another, for fashionable pre-eminence merely and without competition of purchase, is un-republican and wrong, and with that we think the public have a right to be discontented.

The New York public is not silly enough, of course, to make war, otherwise than by expression of opinion, upon the trifles against which so many paragraphs have been latterly aimed, such as "white gloves," "liveried servants," """moustaches," and "opera-glasses"-a citizen having as much right to indulge in any of these, as a Puseyite to wear a straight collar, or a "Mose" to carry his coat on his arm-but these are, notwithstanding, intensitives, and though they would be sufficiently tolerated by themselves, they aggravate the offensiveness of any real ground of complaint against the class

whose peculiarities they are, and can only be made innocent by the removal of the small offence which they intensify. The nut-shell which contains it all, at present, seems to be the privileged seats held for the Opera season by subscribers.

It is our own opinion, that though seats for the season are great conveniences--(for easy finding by acquaintances, for cushioning to suit invalids, and for saving of nightly trouble to secure places)—yet, if the whole class of occasional comers to the Opera, and strangers in town, are thereby excluded from the best seats, and offended, they should not be permitted in the arrangements. The subscribers, and the best seats, are but few. The occasional visitors and strangers are many. We will not stop to show how this is good policy, for the success of the Opera, but we will add that we think it also a proper concession of feeling. In a republic there must be mutual yielding, as far as possible, to the prejudices of classes; and editors and managers, with this principle in their minds, may suggest and arrange remedies for all present likelihoods of discord. With a charming example of this spirit, in our heroic and common-sense President himself, we close these hasty comments on a matter which we should have liked the opportunity to discuss more at our leisure.

SUGGESTIONS OF MAY-DAY IN NEW YORK.

WE have had many a Maying frolic in the country, where, with half a score of bright-faced laughing girls, we have "prevented the dawning of the morning," and brushed the dew from acres of flowering meadows, to gather the freshpeeping violets, and "make roses grow in our cheeks." Blessed days! we would not cease to remember them for an untouched section of California--for there is a gleam of sunshine in every such remembrance, which has power to chase away the shadows of years, and make us quite a child again. But-May-day in New York-was ever a contrast so irreconcilable? Who would not cry with Job-"let it not come into the number of the months?" It is a day which concentrates, in its single brief cycle, the dust, the labor, the burdens, the miseries, the disappointments, the vexations of

two years the remembered evils of the past, and the anticipated troubles of the coming. As if "quarter-day," and the hard face of a querulous landlord were not enough to season one day's trial, it is four quarter-days in one, and moving-washing-scrubbing--scouring-house-cleaningand-putting-to-rights-day, to boot. On that single day, half the houses in New York are turned up-side-down end insideout, and emptied, with all their living and moveable contents into the other half, which, at the same time, are undergoing the same ejective operation, and pouring themselves into the first half. It is the harvest-day of carmen, who, for that day, are released from all deference to the established tariff of fees, and charge every man what is right in his own eyes. It is the annual dooms-day of all domestic husbands, and quiet, orderly old bachelors, who dread its coming worse than the plague or the cholera, and who, for the month before and the month following, are haunted with the nightmare of change and disorder, and can scarcely tell whether they have a home or not. To the ladies--but we forbear-patient souls! they never complain of a bustle, and we have no means of guessing "how it seems" to them. What demon could have possessed good old Santa Claus to allow such a day to come into the Dutchman's calendar? The landlords must have given him chloroform, or the good-natured saint would have vetoed it, with a huge oath for emphasis.

It was recently given in evidence of insanity, in Paris, that a man had hired a lot of ground, and, placing upon it an omnibus without wheels, lived in the vehicle, to his entire satisfaction. We should strongly impugn the evidence. An Indian, accustomed to a wigwam, would find any abode reasonably sufficient which would accommodate "twelve inside," and children at discretion, and which had a door, eleven windows, a hole at the top, and comfortable cushions. The pre-pos-te-rous number of things which people collect together as necessaries of life, would, to a savage, be inexplicable.

But the chief calamity of a May-moving, we think, is the painful suspension of belief in the value of property--the most sacred furniture being so demeaned and profaned by confused displacement and vile proximity, that it seems impossible we can ever regain our respect for it. It is like cutting off a man's nose and laying it on the floor; or

drawing a tooth and packing it in a basket. The articles have anything but the same value as previously.

Ladies having a greater facility of re-producing displaced associations, and it being desirable that gentlemen should retain a reverence for their household gods, we venture to query-whether it would not be an advisable custom for the wife to superintend the moving in toto, sending the husband to a hotel, with order of absence from May 1st till farther advices. Is not this foreshadowingly hinted at, in the words of an old English writer, who, (making no mention of woman,) in his account of the festivities of May morning, says, “Every man, except impediment, would walk into the meadows on May-day?" As it is, one sighs for some place like Psalmanazar's island of Formosa to retreat to :-

"Oh for some fair Formosa, such as he,

The young Jew fabled of, i' the Indian sea,
By nothing but its name of beauty known,

And which poor husbands might make all their own;
Their May-day kingdom-take its beds and stands,
Et cetera, into their own meek hands,

And have, at least, one earthly corner quiet,

While ladies move, who are less troubled by it."

The eruption on the front doors tells us that Spring is at hand--the placards of "To Let," in the city, corresponding with the outbreak of crocuses in the country, as a sign of the season. There is no more significant index of the variableness of fortunes and worldly conditions in this country, than the general change of residence in May. The majority, probably, change for the better, as the majority of citizens are doubtless improving in their circumstances from year to year --but it is a question whether habits of restlessness, injurious to the important feeling of home, are not bred by these annual removals. "Put it o' one side to think of."

There is a certain peculiarity, too, which is often charged upon New York, and which may possibly have grown out of this custom. How many families are there who have “kept moving," till they are in houses beyond their means, and unsuitable to their style of living? The last house which they finally reach, seems to proclaim that they have overshot the mark; for, dwelling there with closed doors, they are literally buried, with four-story monuments over their heads

PROGRESS UP-TOWN.

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-"lost to the friends from whose fond side they have been taken," and occupying, of course, only the basement, where they are. Up-town is sprinkled thick with these four-story sepulchres. How much of that part of the city, indeed, might be planted with cypresses, and laid out as the cemetery of victims of premature removal, we leave open to conjecture.

The number of degrees of rent and house-dignity in New York, and the corresponding means of those who adopt them, would be interesting to know. From board at three dollars a week to a rent of three thousand dollars a year, is not an uncommon transition during the education of a daughter(a "sliding scale" that has its effects!) It is a topic for Hunt's Statistical Magazine--the PROGRESS UP-TOWN, with the different stopping-places and gradations. From the closepacked rookeries of Greenwich-street to the scaffolding wilderness above Union Square-from Over-run-dom to Semidone-dom--there are, at least, twenty degrees of rent and gentility of location. Friend, go up higher," seems to be the text that contains the moving principle of New Yorkbut the Rev. Mr. Beecher, who knows how to hitch worldly wisdom into gospel harness, might preach a valuable sermon on the danger of too hasty obedience to this Scripture injunction.

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A very charming woman, whose toilette had been exceedingly admired at a late fashionable party, but to whom no conversation had been addressed during the evening, declared to us, while waiting for her carriage, that she should accept invitations hereafter by sending her dress and jewels--allowing her superfluous remainder to go to bed with a book. The appropriateness of this economy in New York fashionable society, seemed to us worthy of mention in prints, and it belongs, in fact, to the spirit of anti-needlessness and sensible substitution, which is the manifest taste and tendency of the times. The strongest argument for a family carriage in England, is the power it gives of attending a friend's funeral by equipage-the liveried vehicle, with blinds drawn, expressing quite as poignant grief without the owner inside, and with a great economy of time and tedium. The poor author's reply to his rich host, who pressed the costly meats upon him after his appetite was satisfied :-"No, thank you,