Great cities attract ambitious people. You can sense it when you walk around one. In a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you a message: you could do more; you should try harder.
The surprising thing is how different these messages can be. New York tells you, above all: you should make more money. There are other messages too, of course. You should be hipper. You should be better looking. But the clearest message is that you should be richer.
What I like about Boston (or rather Cambridge) is that the message there is: you should be smarter. You really should get around to reading all those books you've been meaning to.
But the coppersmiths themselves, in their desire to do better or otherwise than their predecessors, soon quit the line of truth and propriety. There comes then a second coppersmith, who proposes to modify the form of the primitive vase in order to seduce the purchaser with the attraction of novelty...and it becomes fashionable, and everybody in town must have one of the vases made by the second coppersmith. A third, seeing the success of this expedient, goes still further, and makes a third vase, with rounder outlines, for anybody who will buy it. Having quite lost sight of the principle, he becomes capricious and fanciful...yet everyone applauds the new vase, and the third coppersmith is regarded as having singularly perfected his art, while in fact he has only robbed the original work of all its style, and produced an object which is really ugly and comparatively inconvenient.