The Northern Traveller, from 1844, relates an earlier,
uncredited, positively gushing description of the capital city on the Hudson:
“The younger race of fashionables and semi-fashionables know
Albany, or affect to know it, merely as a big city-looking place, full of
taverns and hotels, where they land from the steamboat, on their way to
Saratoga, Niagara or Quebec. Another set of less locomotive good folks,
especially in New-York and Philadelphia, have no notions about it, but those
derived from old traditionary jokes about its ancient Schepens and Schoutens,
its burly Burgomasters, ‘its lofty spires glittering with tin, and hospitable
boards smoking with sturgeon.’“But in honest truth, there are few cities of the size any
where, which can exhibit a greater or a more agreeable variety of society and
manners. In Albany may be found talent and learning, accomplishment and beauty.
The towns of Europe of the same size and relative importance, can in this
respect bear no sort of comparison with it. Then, too, its situation, the
prospect from its higher grounds and streets abound in scenes meet for romantic
fiction.”