had abstracted from her Escritoir. In short, we do business altogether upon a different scale—your game, at everything, is" chicken hazard,' to the game we play in England. We trade in lives as familiarly as you trade here in wafers-have an eric for men's hearts, and hire out their constitutions by the day. Look at our daily outlay for mere conveniences (independent of show) of animal strength, and machinery, and capital. See our Brighton coach-horses, they run four years, and then their "work" is" done,"-this, is to save two hours of time, perhaps, daily in the four-and-twenty. Your coal-heaver, by the force of mere muscle, gains eight shillings a-daynot one in twenty of these men lives to be forty years of age. Men, or cattle, with us, it is a short life and a merry one. We pay-we lay out-we use up!-Labourers we wear out three to your one-horses thirty-whips(this is the saddest of the affair) a thousand. And yet it makes a glorious spectacle, the whole, if not quite a satisfying, a strangely cheering, and exciting one. -The thunder is a bolder sound than kettle drumming-the steam-engine, a grander triumph than the barrel organ, and the Thames, black as it is from the "Pool" to "Westminster," will arrest more attention, even from triflers, than the gaudiest of your gold fish ponds at the Thuilleries or Versailles! Paris-from the little I know of it -is a good living for an Englishman who is luxurious and poor. He who loves society, and has not large revenues, will do well here. He who cannot even in the streets-get out of the reach of the lower orders, must have strong nerves, or dull perceptions, if he stays in London. But, for a man of fortune, the case is different-and I see very little in France that such a man cannot obtain in England; while he has a hundred advantages and luxuries at home, which he will look in vain for among you. To your cuisine, no man bows with more deference than I do. Your Potages, all-Julienne—Pureé—Printamere-are philosophic. Your Fritots de Poulet, almost invariably the most refined of human preparations. Your taste for souel is exemplary; your use of the sauce tartare, redeeming; I send to the devil (for whose digestion only they are fit) all our "turtles," and "mock-turtles," and I won't say

a word about some of your dishes with long names, which are only familiar preparations, more known than esteemed among ourselves; (time, whereof the memory of my grandmother is not to the contrary ;) but then the mistake that you fall into, is in imagining that there is no cookery except in France. You forget that, take away only one or two projections, (such as the Omelette souffleé for instance,) which I take to be belles articles rather than pungent dainties, I can get almost every French mets just as perfect in Leicester Square, as at the. Rocher de Cancalle; and this, in addition to many matters in high perfection, which, in Paris, you get in no perfection at all. For, to take the article of fish-(if I am to play the gourmand)-you have neither good fish in Paris, nor a good mode (generally) of dressing it. Think of our salmon-sole-turbot-and, still more, the coquillage-in which we excel you shamefully! What say you to our venison-or to the simple slice-(the centre slice) of beef, or mutton; cut with a sharp knife (which can only be in England) from a haunch, or sirloin, of twenty pounds !-morsels which may take rank, I say, and "bonnetted," notwithstanding their Spartan plainness, with the very proudest services, and most disguised, of foreign manufacture?

Still, you are a fine people!-Coffee!-I can have it made, but there is none made in England such as you make in Paris. Ice, "value upon me" for also. All our preparations of it are weak and inexpensive. Wines, beds, liqueurs, and ornamental furni. ture-take credit for all these to what extent you will. Our English beds are always detestable; some of your most exquisite wines are spoiled in the carriage to us. I am frank-liberal,

and, therefore, though your freshbutter is never well flavoured-though the luscious mysteries of the "fruit pudding" are as a book undisclosed to you, and your "bonne double bierre de mars,” is the drink accursed of God and man, "small beer," though, from sunrise to nightfall, throughout your city, the poele is perpetually going-though you can't open your window to breathe without taking in the "immortal parts" of a fricandeau, or get from the Rue Richelieu to your restaurateurs in the Palais Royal,

without half dining, gratis, on ham and haricol by the way-still these slight flaws in a great system, my free criticism shall scorn to dwell on; and I will vote you unequalled in gastronomic arrangement, if not absolutely unexcepe tionable.

Apropos to the kitchen, however. Some of your best things in the way of "show places," at Paris, are not by any means those that you make the most noise about. Your Halles, (if that be the proper term for the depots of fish, fruit, and poultry,)—your markets are the most convenient, and the most worthy of a great city, that I have seen. There is a very fine market held in the great street of Antwerp, and curiously regulated and conducted too. Up to a given hour in the day, a broad street, near half a mile in length, is covered with produce (en vivres,) of every description, meats, vegetables, game, and thronged with dealers. At the sound of a bell, at one o'clock, all business ceases to a moment. Buyers and sellers split their differences; squadrons of fresh brooms march from their hiding-places, and, in twenty minutes, not a remnant of fish, nor the fragment of a cabbage-leaf, lives to tell what was doing half an hour before. But this is a peculiar feature merely of arrangement; the Paris mar kets have circumstances of building about them, and greater curiosities of merchandize.

It is a fine place, that great square that forms your Fish-market, so neatly covered in and paved, and intersected by its hundred water-courses, to keep off the accumulation of slop and filth. Then the fish in which you deal, of ponds and rivers, though not so good as ours at the table, is more picturesque before it gets there. I like those long rows of wooden troughs and tubs, filled with tench, eels, pike, perch, gudgeon, carp, and trout-all splashing, and swimming, and running races with one another, up to the very moment of their summons to the stew-pan. Then your Dumes de la Halle, are the finest females in Paris—a bold, showy, healthy-looking race of women-and of a rank, too, far above our ladies who sell mackerel, (to whom, in my ignorance, I had assimilated them.) So, again, your fruit, and poultry, and vegetables, make a gay display all, as you collect them; and I could give you credit, not only for these markets,

(though it may be doubted, perhaps, whether the distribution of shops is not more convenient,) but for a great many more of your public dispositions, if it were not that you excite one's indignation constantly, by claiming a triumph for them which they do not merit.

For, to take your Abattoirs, for instance the position of which, beyond the city, no doubt is well judged. The bulls among us are inconvenient at Charing Cross. I believe they have the grace never to go along Pall Mall. But what led you to this improvement?-why sheer necessity. What could you do with mad oxen in your little, narrow, unpaved streets, but get rid of them? Why, you know, you would have been "tossed" on market days from day-break to the going down of the sun. You would have passed your time as your own opera-dancers do, three-fourths of it, hanging between heaven and earth. The droves of cattle must have marched with a surgeon (each) and two undertakers in its rear, to provide for accidents! Therefore, (in this case, for instance,) you should bear your honours meekly, and not talk so loud of the "abodes of cruelty," "pestilence,” and “filth,” that we have in England.

For as to the cruelty, I believe you must pass for that-we spare very little, certainly, either the living or the dead. For the pestilence, it has been a good deal doubted, whether, in times of infectious malady, our butchers have not always come best off. But, for the disgust!—a truce at once to your delicacy, if you please, my friend, and make way for mine, just as another of your famous "public institutions,” the “ Morque” of Paris, comes to my memory.

I went to look at this place almost as soon as I came; for a good nuisance is as exciting often as a gayer spectacle ; but I had no conception how good the morque really was, or that it could giveme a coup, who had seen something of the unseemly, here and there, already.

My man went to reconnoitre on the Sunday evening before the Fete; but there were no subjects in exhibition— "no doubt there would be some in the morning."-So I walked down" in the morning," and I found the place out some yards before I reached the door of it. The hall, which opened immediately into the street, was dark,

confined, and dirty; and there was that sort of damp clamminess upon the doors and wood work which you find in butcheries, great kitchens, and tallow-melters shops, in England. To the right hand lay a narrow stone staircase, leading to the abode, over head, of the Concierge, or keeper; who must live in an atmosphere of exhalations considerably worse than those of an hospital dissecting-room. Round the walls, hung coils of rope, black, soddened, and greasy; with hooks and pulleys used in drawing bodies from the river and elsewhere. And, to the left hand, divided from the spectator by a glass partition, were the "subjects" exposed.

There were three men to be seen on the day that I was there; all taken at different points out of the Seine ; and their appearance was extraordinary. The water with which they were filled, added probably to the process of decomposition, which was commencing, had swollen the bodies to near twice their natural bulk; and one of them, who in his life must have been a large man, presented the human figure under a new, and terrific aspect. The swelling, from whatever cause it proceeded, was not of the stomach or abdomen merely, but general-all the limbs were those of a giant. The flesh, in most parts, was of a dusky green; but the features were perfect, and might have been recognised. I can't describe to you the sensation which the amazing breadth of this corpse-joined to its unusual colour, produced upon the eye! It looked like a huge mishapen statue, of stone, or metal, corroded by damp and age. The other two bodies were less striking; they had lain probably for a shorter time in the water; but the Herculean chest of the tall man is before me still.

Over the heads of the figures hung their wretched clothes, all peacemeal, apparently as cut off from them. Out of the windows above, on the side of the building next the river, some shabby linen, newly washed, but exceedingly ill-coloured, was drying; you could not help fancying that a part of the Concierge wardrobe came out of the perquisites of his office. I took some pains, afterwards, to ascertain the derivation of the title, Morque, which this place bears, but could only find a note in the old Diction

naire Royale" Morgue-Alittle gra-" ted room, in which a new prisoner is set, and must continue some hours, that the gaoler's ordinary servants may the better take notice of his face." The whole was open to the street; persons walked in and out as they went by; and dogs were snuffing about, evidently attracted by the unwholesome odour.

The Quartier, however, in which the Morque stands, and the streets of the same rank on the far side of the river, are to me the most curious and interesting parts of Paris. In your streets of the higher class, I see not much beyond a town inferior, at most points, to our own; but some of the meaner and older ones, say those behind the Quai des Augustins, give a notion to the fancy of what London might have been four centuries ago. In some of the Norman towns, Rouen particularly, this impression is still stronger. Our Richards, Henrys, and Edwards, are before you the moment you pass the gates of it. The approaches to Rouen, both from the coast and from Paris, the latter particularly, are alone worth going to France to

see.

The view, by moonlight, of the town and river, from a hill which they call, I think, Mont St Catherine, you would swear that the Scottish novelist, whoever he is, had studied from that very point. The town itself is still more curious, especially the parts near the Cathedral. I spent half a day in wandering about an immense inn at which I halted in the Rue des Carmes, which had all the peculiarities of decay, amazing extent, and rude Gothic architecture about it. The house, which ran, as usual, round a court-yard, seemed never to have been built at once, or upon any fixed design, but to have got up, a room at a time, from hand to mouth, as the convenience of different possessors, in the last thousand years, had suggested. There were garrets, with their walls five and forty degrees out of the perpendicular! And strange grotesque windows, or, rather, loop-holes, and monstrous approaches, meant for staircases, serving the rats to run up and down into what now were hay-lofts, lumber-rooms, and servants' sleepingchambers. The building reaching, upon the whole, I believe, to nine stories high; as for the number of apartments, I could not count them ;

but it was a day's journey to go from one end of the house to the other.

So Paris, in point of buildings now standing, shews you a much older city than London. You find houses, of which seeing the outside, you could wish to see the inside a curiosity never awakened in Russell or Bedford Square. The sterling romance of the place has departed with its bigotry and pride of Catholic regime; but these are the abodes in which picturesque doings dwelt, although the spirit of their beauty lives no more. You weep for the suppression of the nunneries; but the garrets of Pigault le Brun still remain and I can put my eye at this moment upon the identical three-cornered window, through which my uncle Thomas penetrates from his paternal home into the gite of the chim

ney-sweeps.

But I am wayward, I dare say, and fanciful-for I cannot fall into a great deal that passes for very fine here. Sculpture is out of my line; but I throw away a little money now and then on pictures; and I really cannot see how you can mention the modern artists of France on the same day with ours of England. What is there in David, (who seems to be excessively overrated,) or in Guerin, (whom I often like better,) or in Gerard, comparable to West, or to Sir Thomas Laurence? Then, for your second-rate people, there is a Mr Horace Vernet, who affects to paint with great knowledge of anatomy; and I find a whole host of people imitating this gentleman-who makes his figures look like the "nerve" and "blood-vessel" "subjects" in the Medical Dictionary. Sometimes he goes a little farther than this, and puts a sinew or two in, for extra grace, of his own; I certainly saw an Arabian horse, by him, which shewed more points" than ever any single quadruped came by fairly.

The small pictures here-Tableaux de guere, I think they call them, though I'm sure I don't know why-please me best. I have bought a picture of this kind, by an artist named Vigneron -the Death of a Deserter-which is extremely well imagined. The countenance of the soldier, as he kneels before the platoon, is very calm and manly, and yet highly expressive; and there is an admirable unconsciousness of danger about a poodle dog, who climbs upon his arm just

as the men are about to fire. I saw another story, I believe by the same artist- a female, with her child, thrown dead upon a rocky shore by shipwreck. Four crows sitting upon a stone, watch the bodies, and are kept off by a small dog who still survives. The snarl of the spaniel is very well given indeed; and the eye of the principal crow still better. It says distinctly-" We can wait-In a little while I shall eat you also." These pictures, with a small one-a painting school-by Horace Vernet, are almost the only buyable ones I have seen out of a great collection. But the style does not seem to be popular; you like to be "great" in everything-fine hard outline; plenty of gaudy colour, and canvass ten feet by six, is all the rage. Quackery-villainous quackery! you do exceed us certainly in that. I wont talk about your theatres, because there is so much in them that cannot be appreciated by a foreigner; but Marten, the bear at the Jardin des Plantes, is to me the first comedian in Paris. I have always thought that the humour of animals, and particularly the expression of their countenances, was not done justice to. Marten is magnifique! The stoical contempt with which he regards the urchins who swarm round his den!The grave sedulousness with which he "addresses himself again to sleep," in spite of their Montez, Monsieur Marten-Montez, pour un gateau!— as well knowing that, from such a quarter, no gateau is likely to come. And then, when a respectable-looking man appears, the immediate attention and compliance-the prompt obedience to the En, Montez donc, mon ami!-giving you credit for the apple, on the appearance of your coat!

Marten might have been bred a master of arts. He has more deport

ment than six sheriff's footmen already. If he had only been taught to dance, he would have surpassed the footman who is at this moment practising a cotillon over my head, with scrubbing brushes tied to his feet, in order that he may accomplish himself, and scower the room at the same time. He deserves a grave in Pere La Chaise's burying ground, which is the only real piece of landscape-gardening about Paris; and I will devote to him one of those wreaths, such as the love-sick girls there hang upon the tomb of