WELL! I am in Paris at last; and, wherever you report of me for the rest of your life, I pray you let it be dispraisingly. There never was mountain reputation ran before man yet in the world, but people thought of the ridiculus mus as soon as he appeared. Comparisons apart-I have travelled too far, perhaps, to be easily surprised. Men are apt to know, at five and thirty, that a sprat (saving your delicacy) is not a salmon; and I could not believe a cheese to be the moon, though all Gloucestershire should come to tell me so. But, experience apart, I had heard too much of Paris before I came to it, not to be disappointed, I doubt, were it greater than it is, at finding it so little.

Now I know your objection to me at once. Will I venture to have an opinion upon a three weeks' residence? But why not within three days-since I speak only to the superficies-to the grand coup d'œil? First impressions, in such cases, nine times in ten, are all. A man seldom sees anything so vividly-never so favourably-as at the first glance. Did you ever in your life baulk your first sight at a woodcock, that it was not waste of powder and shot to fire upon the second? Tell me none, therefore, that I am not orienté-no "bombast circumstance," that I don't read the Greek." A plague of the "Greek"-ay, and of the Hebrew-it does not help my disliking the set of your pantaloons, though you should prove that I had never graduated at the shop-board on which they were constructed. What is there, I ask, in the pleasurable capabilities of any metropolis-for I meddle here with nothing else that a man of active habits cannot get as good an idea of in thirty days, as in twice thirty years? To others with your pedantry -come on and fight-if I have no fence, yours is the better chance of victory; and tell me, what is there about Paris to please a man of adventure, (bating always good wine and cookery,) in which it can compete as a metropolis even with Lisbon ?-for, as to likening it to London-Sacre

Paris, 1820.

Dieu!-that would be too good altogether.

What should there be then, in the first place, of picturesque whole about Paris, which, situated at all points as unimposingly as London, wants the general gigantic scale-the extent and strength-the prodigious overpowering physique-which the most frog-eating inhabitant of the former city must confess staggers him in the aspect of the latter? Look from your Pont Neuf, or your Pont au Change-either way-I protest the very view of this place has made me English to a folly! What a figure do you make-I called a man Mounseer in the street yesterday, only for the honour of my nation! What a figure do you make here after one comparative glance-upwards or downwards-from Blackfriars or Waterloo Bridge! Why your river?— The Thames is muddy sometimes, certainly; but we cut kennels, (or canals at least,) as wide, and deeper, than the Seine. Your Louvre is showy, I grant, though sadly unwieldy. Our Somerset-House is a palace no longer, and washerwomen hang their shirts to dry against it. But what would you give, "good Monsieur Le Beau," if you could quote me such a building as St Paul's, from your Pont des Arts, rising one way, and a pile like Westminster-Abbey finishing the view on the other? You get a glimpse of banks and fields beyond us from your Pont Notre Dame ; because London is so large, that a man can't see from the middle of it into the country; but I don't find a great deal even in this better than "Lambeth-Walk," or our

For, miserables that you are! look only at the display of strength-the sheer power-the grasp the nervethe muscle, national and individual that stands paraded on the banks of the Thames, between Blackfriars and Westminster! Look at the heaps of iron, coal, corn, timber, salt-material to build a world, and food to nourish it! Look at the coal-barges-the fleets only of coal-barges-the mere wherries, rogue!-the very commonsewers (I won't bate you the puddledocks!) Why, don't you think, now, that one London coal-heaver, "sawed into quantities," would make five-andthirty of your charbonniers, who, I protest, are only blue-they don't reach the dignity of being black? and, for our in-land carriage-only fancy a York waggon-one string of Meux's drays-of coal-waggons-nay, of milkman's grain-carts-what a matter does your roulage of every description shew by the side of it!

But you give up this boutiquerie affair-(is it not so?)-in" buying and selling" we are unrivalled, and we excel in the appliances of it.-With all my heart; your pretensions the other way your luxe-your faste-your disposition tout-a-fait Asiatique-I don't accord to them a whit.

After all, whatever may be their national pride, I think the English have less national vanity about them than any people in Europe. Every Mile-end Cockney that one crosses, at home or abroad, is in ecstasies about Paris, up to swooning; and yet I can scarcely find a Frenchman, who, after seeing London, has not some quarrel to make out against it. As I live by roast beef, there dwells in this city everlastingly one vile and particular odour-one most "ancient and fishlike smell"-one salt, sour, sea-weedlike, close, damnable, detestable effluvium! It puts you in mind constantly of Seven Dials, or of Spitalfields; makes you regret the pleasant purlieus of Wapping, or of Drury Lane; batters upon your nose incessantly, not only in this particular metropolis, but in every large town throughout the country. You scent it first half a league to the seaward of Calais; lose it (if the wind lies in front of you) about two leagues to the landward: and recognize it again regularly every time you come to six houses in a row, all through France, increasing in pungency as you

get near Paris! And yet a Frenchman, not two years since, coming into London with me in July, at very Bayswater, began to sentir the charbon de mer, and be oppressed by the nuage de fumée, with which our metropolis" was always covered;" when, I'll take my oath, there was not a cloud, either of fumée, or anything else, to be found, as big as a pockethandkerchief, in the whole circumference of the island. Oh Englandmy country! I shall grow a very Laplander in the love of home. I shall become more patriotic than the Hottentot, who maintained that Adam was black; or the Irishman, who fought a duel to shew that the original Garden of Eden was Ballinasloe!

It is our Tour-mongers -our "Sketch" composers, who have done the most to set this Paris rage on foot;-they came to France to be astonished; and, between couleur de rose and couleur d'enfer, there was no medium. Crowds come, of second-class people too, to live at a rate which they never aspired to at home; and, as they never ate a good dinner except in Paris, believe naturally that it is in Paris only that good dinners can be produced.

But you boast of your luxury— your excess!-You are weak, my friend, on the contrary, very weakweak in your splendour-in your crime-in your everything. For a man who knows how to live, or for a man who desires to die, your city is but as a baby-house-a child's puppetshow of motions-when compared with London. Take the Palais Royal, (and when you take that, you have got Paris,) and, what, with its dusty walks, and stunted trees, and silly jet d'eau, which, if it would water the place with its bubbling, might do some. thing-what does it amount to? As regards the matter of building, it gives you a collection of "arcades," very inferior to our "Burlington-place," or the passages round the Opera-House. For the huddling together of ornamental merchandize, you don't make so good a show as we do at our Bazaar establishment in Soho Square. But if we are to talk, in earnest, of splendid shops-of rich and brilliant wares exhibited-of tailors, drapers, milliners, jewellers, perfumers, able to odoriferise and adorn the universe,-what is there in the Palais Royal, or in the Rue Vivienne, or in all Paris put

together, to set against Oxford Street, Cheapside, or the Strand; far less against Bond Street, Regent Street, or Piccadilly?

If we are to compare luxuries by the folly and vices-the profusions and the crimes-the miseries and the excesses-which make up the account of greatness in a capital city,-will you even name your Palais Royal-if we are to compare upon this head-against our simple parish of Covent Garden; just taking in the ground between Drury-Lane theatre, and the farther side of Leicester Square? Why even in our vices-I will rule even in illour physique casts you to a distance that is immeasurable. Can you drink -from high to low-in your Palais Royal;-game, rob, riot, revel, or blaspheme, as we do all these, night by night, between St James's Street and "The Bedford," or " The Hummums?" Offensive as the subject is, look at our public women,-what a wealth, what a costliness, our system has, compared with yours. Our very thieves and swindlers!-You only pretend to be rogues here; you have no title even to be hanged in English company! In despite of yourselves, you are, and shall be, a very honest, simple, inoffensive people. The Grand Nation!-Do you think, that such a set of knaves as ours of London merely, can be found in all Paris, or in all the world? What a community must it be that feeds all these vultures, and yet scarce feels the effect of their rapacity? The fact is, you autres François have a smart spice of quackery in all you do; and the English who visit you become more absurd even than you are yourselves. Heaven give the man patience, who has eyes in his head to see, and who comes to this country with them open-ready to admire all he has heard talked about in England! If I did not know that there were circumstances which tended to keep you in good humour while you were here; that you got new rank, and came as a conqueror, and came off a campaign, too, with the appetite of a soldier,-I should say, past question, you had been bitten by a French barber, or had fallen into being a noodle by the force of infection. For Paris, to an Englishman who has seen the Continent generally, presents nothing, on the face of it, strikingly new. I was far more pleased with my journey

through the Netherlands, and round by Hesse Cassel, Hanover, and Brunswick. Indeed, the country of France, the great provincial towns that I have seen, such as Rouen, Amiens, and Abbeville, almost all have satisfied me better (probably because I had heard them praised less) than the capital. You would laugh to hear of half the trifles which I had marked down, before I came, as curiosities; and which I have fallen into a rage at finding had neither curiosity, nor even novelty, about them.-And, for example,

The first morning after my arrival, I rode on horseback over the Pont Neuf; the place where the wind, you know, according to Sterne, is more blasphemously sacre Dieud than in any other part of Paris.-N. B. This is not that the river is wide here, nor the situation high or bold; but that about twenty streets, from as many different quarters, converge to the bridge as to a centre. So you blaspheme at the Pont Neuf, not because the wind blows harder there than at other places, but because, blow which way it will, you are sure there to come in for a current of it.-But, about three weeks before this, thinking in London of what wonders I should find in Paris, my eye had been caught by some coloured engravings of French women of different trades-blanchesseuses, tricotteuses, and, above all, the tondeuses de chiens, the prettiest, smartest, little girls-you quite broke your heart that they had not a better calling.-Well, sir, as I rode over the bridge, thinking of these very girls, and almost wishing I was a dog, that I might be sheared by one of them, I noticed a number of little stalls, kept by wretches like those (only worse) who sell walking-sticks, and brooms, upon our highways. At one of them, under a ragged umbrella, sat a wrinkled deformity of ninety, cutting the hair of an unfortunate poodle dog, who struggled-the-beast-as well as the arrangement of his legs, three of which were tied, would permit him. I dare say he was kept in tondement constantly, as a pattern, or sign, to attract the custom of others. Upon a pole, by the side of the scabby umbrella, hung a board, in good plain French, announcing the name, terms, and, moreover, the several capabilities, of this precious operator of whom, by the way, the young matous of the

neighbourhood, or, as they call them here, chats de goutiere, entertain, even more than the dogs, a deep jealousy and suspicion. All along the Pont, sat other of the same "Pagan images;' some exclusively given to couper, and chatrer; others, for the sake of variety, cleaning a little shoes, or dabbling in a commerce of bones and rags; and these idols-what will your "Picture of Paris" people say to this? -these human non-descripts, were my tondeuses de chiens!

And everything written or reported to me by yourself or others is upon the same façon-pompous annunciation, ending, when one examines the affair, in nothing. Shade of Capability, Brown! how the gardens of the Thuilleries were commended to me!with their snug-trimmed orange-trees growing out of square green-painted boxes-parterres laid out like an estate on the top of a twelfth-cake-gaudy white statues, and water in basins thirty feet superficial-all so fine prepense, and formal, and well swept and cleaned, and gimcracky. The same style again at the Luxembourg; the same with a little exception for the Trianons-at Versailles. They must have set a mathematician to arrange their pleasure-grounds, and his model was the backgammon-board, or else he copied from the monstrous angularities of the toy they call the Chinese Puzzle.

I toiled through your overgrown, unfurnished palace of Versailles. Horrible exertion! It was a public day, but I was forced to go, because the grandes eaux were to be exhibited. And-the crowd!-The first blessing, surely, that wealth should procure for a man is solitude! I once thought it was the power of being idle; but now I am sure it is the power of being alone. It was a burning day when I adventured-Sunday-all the world at Versailles-thermometer, 190! The road from Paris-not one foot of which is watered-and all made of that particular sand which never cements, except in people's eyes-there was not one moment, in all the twelve-miles ride, that I could see a hundred yards before me! You get carried-that is, the monde does-the whole distance, for a franc, and all Paris seemed to be taking its departure. The one-horse stages, the pots de chambre, carried nine passengers in each. Cabriolets-fiacres waggons covered with canvass-all

were glutted with people, smart, talkative, and happy. I tried my chariot open, and then I was roasted. I closed it, and then I was baked. Meanwhile, the dust!-But at the palace gate there regularly stand a company of men and boys, with brushes in their hands, and whisks, to cleanse visitors— this is fact!-as they descend from their equipages.

Then, the crowd-the suffocation! in the few rooms that I did venture through! In all the courts, nothing but that vile sablon, that they seem so fond of here, to walk upon. In the apartments, an eternal white and gold, with great looking-glasses, and bad pictures-for half the pictures are bad -or not excellent, which amounts to the same thing.-Nothing now in the aspect of the place as if it had ever been built to be inhabited. I certainly admired your disposition of the fountains; and they, here and there, give some points of beauty-though sadly artificial always-to the grounds. The ring of arches, within which the dances champetre were given (as I am told) in the days of the old court, is fanciful, with its fifty illuminated jets, rising from, and returning into, as many marble basins. The " concert" gazon, too, with its cascade rolling over coloured lamps, must have had some fairy-like, glittering charac◄ ter about it. And at the water exhibition par preference-the "Bath," I think, of "Neptune"-(though giving Neptune a bath sounds something like giving Pluto a warming-pan) — the people collected, ranged in rows one above another, upon the rising bank, (I should think a quarter of a mile long, and a hundred yards across,) that surrounds the pool, formed the most striking public assemblage-none looking what we call the "lower class," at all events, the gayest that, as Count Cassel expresses it, I ever saw " in the course of my travels." But then the impression of the whole place, after all, is that of a toy ; and of a toy rather in fantastic, childish, clumsy taste. Windsor Castle, with its glorious park and river! Can any man compare the two for a moment? Or, what is there in the Gardens of the Thuilleries, taking the Champs Elysees into the bargain, which can be looked at against our Hyde Park, putting Kensington Gardens out of the question?

And Paris is not quite so select nei

ther, I am inclined to think, as to its English company; and, for that reason among others, not quite so agreeable as it was when you were here. Our monsters, who used to go to Margate and Brighton, (I never knew which set were the most detestable,) now cross the water. You can't ima gine how we are over-run with bankers' clerks (English) and pert prentices, upon furlough. They get "booked" from London to Paris, with "diner copieuse" all the way, for five pounds; and I saw a publication the other day, proving that, by bringing food from town, instead of dining at Canterbury, and sleeping on board the packet at Dover, (for which nothing was to be paid,) instead of going to an inn, the whole expense, by-drinkings included, might be defrayed for four pounds ten. Then the moneyed visitors, who don't do things in this way, they all go to Very's; which, accordingly, from being one of the best, is becoming one of the worst houses in Paris. I saw three men dining there the other day, (to be sure they were censés au monsieur, which was worth something;) but it was delightful, even aeross the room, to see the trash that they were swallowing, with, ever and anon, an Ay! This is something like a glass of wine!" For myself, I like Prevot's dinner and wines at least as well as Very's, and his salon, and style of waiting, a great deal better. But Very has been talked about in England; and, that once done-ça ira!

66

There are some "blacking" shops added to the puanteur of the Palais Royal, into which any person, who is sufficiently filthy, may walk, and enjoy the luxury of having his shoes cleaned upon his feet.-I saw these institutions quoted in a book the other day as an example of the ultra luxuriousness of the Parisians! There happens to be a coffee-house too in town, with not so much looking-glass quite about it, as Everington the linen-draper has in his shop and all the world has been in arms about the "Café de Mille Colonnes!"—with a tale about the beauty of the mistress of it, quite as veracious as the rest of the history.

Good wine's needing no bush, is no proverb of French manufacture. (And, indeed, there are other countries where good bush's needing no wine of the two would be the more popular maxn.) But here is a house at which

two blind fiddlers play of an evening -and this becomes the "Café des Aveugles!" At another, your currant water is served by persons in masquerade dresses. And this place-(it would be beset in England)—is the " Café Chinois !",

But the Milles Colonnes, of all your quackeries, reminds me of that which is the most wicked-the story about the beauty, and desirableness, of your women! I always suspected the truth of this account, because the French women whom I met abroad were not handsome; but your population of Paris more than realises my apprehensions—it is not merely not handsome, but the most inexcusably unhandsome that I ever beheld.

Your Grisettes, with their "neat ancles," and "bien chausses!' those themselves must be pug-nosed, who have written these things. For the "ancles," and so forth, I think, in the mass, they are decidedly bad. In the rank of "Grisettes," searching most curiously the milliners', glovers', and haberdashers' shops, I have been quite surprised to find so many girls so sinfully devoid of all attraction. The exceptions to this condition are few; chiefly found among the higher classes-and then it is not at all clear to me that beauty is understood in this country, where you have it. There is a girl lodges opposite to my house

-she is a third-rate actress, but certainly the finest woman that I have seen in Paris-the French whom I talk to don't particularly admire her, which is suspicious. Again, you have so many tender figures, roundabout ways in your language, of nominating the affliction which we know by the term, "plainness." There is your genti, which amounts to what we should call the " pert." Then there is your espiegle, used, I believe, when anybody squints; and then your aimable, we translate, all over the world, as the "perfectly detestable.”

66

Certain it is, that both as to personal attraction, and as to the "dressing," figure," &c. upon which the French affect to plume themselves, they stand, take them in equal numbers, incomparably below the English. Awkward as the people who come here are, many of them, in that which appertains to rank or fashion, you never meet a welldressed man or woman in the streets, but you find that they are English. Of the French women, few of any