Transcriber's Note:

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation in the original document have been preserved. The author's use of accents was retained as printed.

PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY:
WRITTEN
DURING SOME YEARS OF RESIDENCE AND TRAVEL
IN
EUROPE.

BY
N. PARKER WILLIS.

NEW YORK:
CHARLES SCRIBNER, 124 GRAND STREET.

MDCCCLX.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1852, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER,
In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of New York.

PREFACE.

A word or two of necessary explanation, dear reader.

I had resided on the Continent for several years, and had been a year in England, without being suspected, I believe, in the societies in which I lived, of any habit of authorship. No production of mine had ever crossed the water, and my Letters to the New-York Mirror, were (for this long period, and I presumed would be forever), as far as European readers were concerned, an unimportant and easy secret. Within a few months of returning to this country, the Quarterly Review came out with a severe criticism on the Pencillings by the Way, published in the New-York Mirror. A London publisher immediately procured a broken set of this paper from an American resident there, and called on me with an offer of £300 for an immediate edition of what he had—rather less than one half of the Letters in this present volume. This chanced on the day before my marriage, and I left immediately for Paris—a literary friend most kindly undertaking to look over the proofs, and suppress what might annoy any one then living in London. The book was printed in three volumes, at about $7 per copy, and in this expensive shape three editions were sold by the original publisher. After his death a duodecimo edition was put forth, very beautifully illustrated; and this has been followed by a fifth edition lately published, with new embellishments, by Mr. Virtue. The only American edition (long ago out of print) was a literal copy of this imperfect and curtailed book.

In the present complete edition, the Letters objected to by the Quarterly, are, like the rest, re-published as originally written. The offending portions must be at any rate, harmless, after being circulated extensively in this country in the Mirror, and prominently quoted from the Mirror in the Quarterly—and this being true, I have felt that I could gratify the wish to be put fairly on trial for these alleged offences—to have a comparison instituted between my sins, in this respect, and Hamilton's, Muskau's, Von Raumer's, Marryat's and Lockhart's—and so, to put a definite value and meaning upon the constant and vague allusions to these iniquities, with which the critiques of my contemporaries abound. I may state as a fact, that the only instance in which a quotation by me from the conversation of distinguished men gave the least offence in England, was the one remark made by Moore the poet at a dinner party, on the subject of O'Connell. It would have been harmless, as it was designed to be, but for the unexpected celebrity of my Pencillings; yet with all my heart I wished it unwritten.

I wish to put on record in this edition (and you need not be at the trouble of perusing them unless you please, dear reader!) an extract or two from the London prefaces to "Pencillings," and parts of two articles written apropos of the book's offences.

The following is from the Preface to the first London edition:—

"The extracts from these Letters which have appeared in the public prints, have drawn upon me much severe censure. Admitting its justice in part, perhaps I may shield myself from its remaining excess by a slight explanation. During several years' residence in Continental and Eastern countries, I have had opportunities (as attaché to a foreign Legation), of seeing phases of society and manners not usually described in books of travel. Having been the Editor, before leaving the United States, of a monthly Review, I found it both profitable and agreeable, to continue my interest in the periodical in which that Review was merged at my departure, by a miscellaneous correspondence. Foreign courts, distinguished men, royal entertainments, &c. &c.,—matters which were likely to interest American readers more particularly—have been in turn my themes. The distance of America from these countries, and the ephemeral nature and usual obscurity of periodical correspondence, were a sufficient warrant to my mind, that the descriptions would die where they first saw the light, and fulfil only the trifling destiny for which they were intended. I indulged myself, therefore, in a freedom of detail and topic which is usual only in posthumous memoirs—expecting as soon that they would be read in the countries and by the persons described, as the biographer of Byron and Sheridan, that these fruitful and unconscious themes would rise from the dead to read their own interesting memoirs! And such a resurrection would hardly be a more disagreeable surprise to that eminent biographer, than was the sudden appearance to me of my own unambitious Letters in the Quarterly Review.

"The reader will see (for every Letter containing the least personal detail has been most industriously republished in the English papers) that I have in some slight measure corrected these Pencillings by the Way. They were literally what they were styled—notes written on the road, and despatched without a second perusal; and it would be extraordinary if, between the liberty I felt with my material, and the haste in which I scribbled, some egregious errors in judgment and taste had not crept in unawares. The Quarterly has made a long arm over the water to refresh my memory on this point. There are passages I would not re-write, and some remarks on individuals which I would recall at some cost, and would not willingly see repeated in these volumes. Having conceded thus much, however, I may express my surprise that this particular sin should have been visited upon me, at a distance of three thousand miles, when the reviewer's own literary fame rests on the more aggravated instance of a book of personalities, published under the very noses of the persons described. Those of my Letters which date from England were written within three or four months of my first arrival in this country. Fortunate in my introductions, almost embarrassed with kindness, and, from advantages of comparison, gained by long travel, qualified to appreciate keenly the delights of English society, I was little disposed to find fault. Everything pleased me. Yet in one instance—one single instance—I indulged myself in stricture upon individual character, and I repeat it in this work, sure that there will be but one person in the world of letters who will not read it with approbation—the editor of the Quarterly himself. It was expressed at the time with no personal feeling, for I had never seen the individual concerned, and my name had probably never reached his ears. I but repeated what I had said a thousand times, and never without an indignant echo to its truth—an opinion formed from the most dispassionate perusal of his writings—that the editor of that Review was the most unprincipled critic of his age. Aside from its flagrant literary injustice, we owe to the Quarterly, it is well known, every spark of ill-feeling that has been kept alive between England and America for the last twenty years. The sneers, the opprobrious epithets of this bravo in literature, have been received in a country where the machinery of reviewing was not understood, as the voice of the English people, and an animosity for which there was no other reason, has been thus periodically fed and exasperated. I conceive it to be my duty as a literary man—I know it is my duty as an American—to lose no opportunity of setting my heel on the head of this reptile of criticism."

The following is part of an article, written by myself, on the subject of personalities, for a periodical in New York:

"There is no question, I believe, that pictures of living society, where society is in very high perfection, and of living persons, where they are "persons of mark," are both interesting to ourselves, and valuable to posterity. What would we not give for a description of a dinner with Shakspeare and Ben Jonson—of a dance with the Maids of Queen Elizabeth—of a chat with Milton in a morning call? We should say the man was a churl, who, when he had the power, should have refused to 'leave the world a copy' of such precious hours. Posterity will decide who are the great of our time—but they are at least among those I have heard talk, and have described and quoted, and who would read without interest, a hundred years hence, a character of the second Virgin Queen, caught as it was uttered in a ball-room of her time? or a description of her loveliest Maid of Honor, by one who had stood opposite her in a dance, and wrote it before he slept? or a conversation with Moore or Bulwer?—when the Queen and her fairest maid, and Moore and Bulwer have had their splendid funerals, and are dust, like Elizabeth and Shakspeare?

"The harm, if harm there be in such sketches, is in the spirit in which they are done. If they are ill-natured or untrue, or if the author says aught to injure the feelings of those who have admitted him to their confidence or hospitality, he is to blame, and it is easy, since he publishes while his subjects are living, to correct his misrepresentations, and to visit upon him his infidelities of friendship.

"But (while I think of it), perhaps some fault-finder will be pleased to tell me, why this is so much deeper a sin in me than in all other travellers. Has Basil Hall any hesitation in describing a dinner party in the United States, and recording the conversation at table? Does Miss Martineau stick at publishing the portrait of a distinguished American, and faithfully recording all he says in a confidential tête-à-tête? Have Captain Hamilton and Prince Pukler, Von Raumer and Captain Marryat, any scruples whatever about putting down anything they hear that is worth the trouble, or of describing any scene, private or public, which would tell in their book, or illustrate a national peculiarity? What would their books be without this class of subjects? What would any book of travels be, leaving out everybody the author saw, and all he heard? Not that I justify all these authors have done in this way, for I honestly think they have stepped over the line, which I have but trod close upon."

Surely it is the abuse, and not the use of information thus acquired, that makes the offence.

The most formal, unqualified, and severe condemnation recorded against my Pencillings, however, is that of the renowned Editor of the Quarterly, and to show the public the immaculate purity of the forge where this long-echoed thunder is manufactured, I will quote a passage or two from a book of the same description, by the Editor of the Quarterly himself. 'Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk,' by Mr. Lockhart, are three volumes exclusively filled with portraits of persons, living at the time it was written in Scotland, their conversation with the author, their manners, their private histories, etc., etc. In one of the letters upon the 'Society of Edinburgh,' is the following delicate passage:—

"'Even you, my dear Lady Johnes, are a perfect history in every branch of knowledge. I remember, only the last time I saw you, you were praising with all your might the legs of Col. B——, those flimsy, worthless things that look as if they were bandaged with linen rollers from the heel to the knee. You may say what you will, but I still assert, and I will prove it if you please by pen and pencil, that, with one pair of exceptions, the best legs in Cardigan are Mrs. P——'s. As for Miss J—— D——'s, I think they are frightful.' * * * *

"Two pages farther on he says:—

"'As for myself, I assure you that ever since I spent a week at Lady L——'s and saw those great fat girls of hers, waltzing every night with that odious De B——, I can not endure the very name of the thing.'

"I quote from the second edition of these letters, by which it appears that even these are moderated passages. A note to the first of the above quotations runs as follows:

"'A great part of this letter is omitted in the Second Edition in consequence of the displeasure its publication gave to certain ladies in Cardiganshire. As for the gentleman who chose to take what I said of him in so much dudgeon, he will observe, that I have allowed what I said to remain in statu quo, which I certainly should not have done, had he expressed his resentment in a proper manner.'

"So well are these unfortunate persons' names known by those who read the book in England, that in the copy which I have from a circulating library, they are all filled out in pencil. And I would here beg the reader to remark that these are private individuals, compelled by no literary or official distinction to come out from their privacy and figure in print, and in this, if not in the taste and quality of my descriptions, I claim a fairer escutcheon than my self-elected judge—for where is a person's name recorded in my letters who is not either by tenure of public office, or literary, or political distinction, a theme of daily newspaper comment, and of course fair game for the traveller.

"I must give one more extract from Mr. Lockhart's book, an account of a dinner with a private merchant of Glasgow.

"'I should have told you before, that I had another visiter early in the morning, besides Mr. H. This was a Mr. P——, a respectable merchant of the place, also an acquaintance of my friend W——. He came before H——, and after professing himself very sorry that his avocations would not permit him to devote his forenoon to my service, he made me promise to dine with him.... My friend soon joined me, and observing from the appearance of my countenance that I was contemplating the scene with some disgust,' (the Glasgow Exchange) 'My good fellow,' said he, 'you are just like every other well-educated stranger that comes into this town; you can not endure the first sight of us mercantile whelps. Do not, however, be alarmed; I will not introduce you to any of these cattle at dinner. No, sir! You must know that there are a few men of refinement and polite information in this city. I have warned two or three of these raræ aves, and depend upon it, you shall have a very snug day's work.' So saying he took my arm, and observing that five was just on the chap, hurried me through several streets and lanes till we arrived in the ——, where his house is situated. His wife was, I perceived, quite the fine lady, and, withal, a little of the blue stocking. Hearing that I had just come from Edinburgh, she remarked that Glasgow would be seen to much more disadvantage after that elegant city. 'Indeed,' said she, 'a person of taste, must, of course, find many disagreeables connected with a residence in such a town as this; but Mr. P——'s business renders the thing necessary for the present, and one can not make a silk purse of a sow's ear—he, he, he!' Another lady of the company, carried this affectation still farther; she pretended to be quite ignorant of Glasgow and its inhabitants, although she had lived among them the greater part of her life, and, by the by, seemed no chicken. I was afterward told by my friend Mr. H——, that this damsel had in reality sojourned a winter or two in Edinburgh, in the capacity of lick-spittle or toad-eater to a lady of quality, to whom she had rendered herself amusing by a malicious tongue; and that during this short absence, she had embraced the opportunity of utterly forgetting everything about the West country.

"'The dinner was excellent, although calculated apparently for forty people rather than sixteen, which last number sat down. While the ladies remained in the room, there was such a noise and racket of coarse mirth, ill restrained by a few airs of sickly sentiment on the part of the hostess, that I really could neither attend to the wine nor the dessert; but after a little time a very broad hint from a fat Falstaff, near the foot of the table, apparently quite a privileged character, thank Heaven! sent the ladies out of the room. The moment after which blessed consummation, the butler and footman entered, as if by instinct, the one with a huge punch bowl, the other with, &c.'"

I do thank Heaven that there is no parallel in my own letters to either of these three extracts. It is a thing of course that there is not. They are violations of hospitality, social confidence, and delicacy, of which even my abusers will allow me incapable. Yet this man accuses me of all these things, and so runs criticism!

And to this I add (to conclude this long Preface) some extracts from a careful review of the work in the North American:—

"'Pencillings by the Way,' is a very spirited book. The letters out of which it is constructed, were written originally for the New-York 'Mirror,' and were not intended for distinct publication. From this circumstance, the author indulged in a freedom of personal detail, which we must say is wholly unjustifiable, and we have no wish to defend it. This book does not pretend to contain any profound observations or discussions on national character, political condition, literature, or even art. It would be obviously impossible to carry any one of these topics thoroughly out, without spending vastly more time and labor upon it than a rambling poet is likely to have the inclination to do. In fact, there are very few men, who are qualified, by the nature of their previous studies, to do this with any degree of edification to their readers. But a man of general intellectual culture, especially if he have the poetical imagination superadded, may give us rapid sketches of other countries, which will both entertain and instruct us. Now this book is precisely such a one as we have here indicated. The author travelled through Europe, mingling largely in society, and visited whatever scenes were interesting to him as an American, a scholar, and a poet. The impressions which these scenes made upon his mind, are described in these volumes; and we must say, we have rarely fallen in with a book of a more sprightly character, a more elegant and graceful style, and full of more lively descriptions. The delineations of manners are executed with great tact; and the shifting pictures of natural scenery pass before us as we read, exciting a never-ceasing interest. As to the personalities which have excited the wrath of British critics, we have, as we said before, no wish to defend them; but a few words upon the tone, temper, and motives, of those gentlemen, in their dealing with our author, will not, perhaps, be considered inappropriate.

"It is a notorious fact, that British criticism, for many years past, has been, to a great extent, free from all the restraints of a regard to literary truth. Assuming the political creed of an author, it would be a very easy thing to predict the sort of criticism his writings would meet with, in any or all of the leading periodicals of the kingdom. This tendency has been carried so far, that even discussions of points in ancient classical literature have been shaped and colored by it. Thus, Aristophanes' comedies are turned against modern democracy, and Pindar, the Theban Eagle, has been unceremoniously classed with British Tories, by the London Quarterly. Instead of inquiring 'What is the author's object? How far has he accomplished it? How far is that object worthy of approbation?'—three questions that are essential to all just criticism; the questions put by English Reviewers are substantially 'What party does he belong to? Is he a Whig, Tory, Radical, or is he an American?' And the sentence in such cases depends on the answer to them. Even where British criticism is favorable to an American author, its tone is likely to be haughty and insulting; like the language of a condescending city gentleman toward some country cousin, whom he is kind enough to honor with his patronage.

"Now, to critics of this sort, Mr. Willis was a tempting mark. No one can for a moment believe that the London Quarterly, Frazer's Magazine, and Captain Marryat's monthly, are honest in the language they hold toward Mr. Willis. Motives, wide enough from a love of truth, guided the conduct of these journals. The editor of the London Quarterly, it is well known, is the author of 'Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk,' a work full of personalities, ten times more objectionable than anything to be found in the 'Pencillings.' Yet this same editor did not blush to write and print a long and most abusive tirade upon the American traveller, for doing what he had himself done to a much greater and more reprehensible extent; and, to cap the climax of inconsistency, republished in his journal the very personalities, names and all, which had so shocked his delicate sensibilities. It is much more likely that a disrespectful notice of the London Quarterly and its editor, in these 'Pencillings,' was the source from which this bitterness flowed, than that any sense of literary justice dictated the harsh review. Another furious attack on Mr. Willis's book appeared in the monthly journal, under the editorial management of Captain Marryat, the author of a series of very popular sea novels. Whoever was the author of that article, ought to be held disgraced in the opinions of all honorable men. It is the most extraordinary tissue of insolence and coarseness, with one exception, that we have ever seen, in any periodical which pretended to respectability of literary character. It carries its grossness to the intolerable length of attacking the private character of Mr. Willis, and throwing out foolish sneers about his birth and parentage. It is this article which led to the well-known correspondence, between the American Poet and the British Captain, ending in a hostile meeting. It is to be regretted that Mr. Willis should so far forget the principles of his New England education, as to participate in a duel. We regard the practice with horror; we believe it not only wicked, but absurd. We can not possibly see how, Mr. Willis's tarnished fame could be brightened by the superfluous work of putting an additional quantity of lead into the gallant captain. But there is, perhaps, no disputing about tastes; and, bad as we think the whole affair was, no candid man can read the correspondence without feeling that Mr. Willis's part of it, is infinitely superior to the captain's, in style, sense, dignity of feeling, and manly honor.

"But, to return to the work from which we have been partially drawn aside. Its merits in point of style are unquestionable. It is written in a simple, vigorous, and highly descriptive form of English, and rivets the reader's attention throughout. There are passages in it of graphic eloquence, which it would be difficult to surpass from the writings of any other tourist, whatever. The topics our author selects, are, as has been already stated, not those which require long and careful study to appreciate and discuss; they are such as the poetic eye would naturally dwell upon, and a poetic hand rapidly delineate, in a cursory survey of foreign lands. Occasionally, we think, Mr. Willis enters too minutely into the details of the horrible. Some of his descriptions of the cholera, and the pictures he gives us of the catacombs of the dead, are ghastly. But the manners of society he draws with admirable tact; and personal peculiarities of distinguished men, he renders with a most life-like vivacity. Many of his descriptions of natural scenery are more like pictures, than sketches in words. The description of the Bay of Naples will occur as a good example.

"It would be impossible to point out, with any degree of particularity, the many passages in this book whose beauty deserves attention. But it may be remarked in general, that the greater part of the first volume is not so fresh and various, and animated, as the second. This we suppose arises partly from the fact that France and Italy have long been beaten ground.

"The last part of the book is a statement of the author's observations upon English life and society; and it is this portion, which the English critics affect to be so deeply offended with. The most objectionable passage in this is the account of a dinner at Lady Blessington's. Unquestionably Mr. Moore's remarks about Mr. O'Connell ought not to have been reported, considering the time when, and the place where, they were uttered; though they contain nothing new about the great Agitator, the secrets disclosed being well known to some millions of people who interest themselves in British politics, and read the British newspapers. We close our remarks on this work by referring our readers to a capital scene on board a Scotch steamboat, and a breakfast at Professor Wilson's, the famous editor of Blackwood, both in the second volume, which we regret our inability to quote."

"Every impartial reader must confess, that for so young a man, Mr. Willis has done much to promote the reputation of American literature. His position at present is surrounded with every incentive to a noble ambition. With youth and health to sustain him under labor; with much knowledge of the world acquired by travel and observation, to draw upon; with a mature style, and a hand practised in various forms of composition, Mr. Willis's genius ought to take a wider and higher range than it has ever done before. We trust we shall meet him again, ere long, in the paths of literature; and we trust that he will take it kindly, if we express the hope, that he will lay aside those tendencies to exaggeration, and to an unhealthy tone of sentiment, which mar the beauty of some of his otherwise most agreeable books."

CONTENTS.

PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY.

LETTER I.

At Sea.—I have emerged from my berth this morning for the first time since we left the Capes. We have been running six or seven days before a strong northwest gale, which, by the scuds in the sky, is not yet blown out, and my head and hand, as you will see by my penmanship, are anything but at rights. If you have ever plunged about in a cold rain-storm at sea for seven successive days, you can imagine how I have amused myself.

I wrote to you after my pilgrimage to the tomb of Washington. It was almost the only object of natural or historical interest in our own country that I had not visited, and that seen, I made all haste back to embark, in pursuance of my plans of travel, for Europe. At Philadelphia I found a first-rate merchant-brig, the Pacific, on the eve of sailing for Havre. She was nearly new, and had a French captain, and no passengers—three very essential circumstances to my taste—and I took a berth in her without hesitation. The next day she fell down the river, and on the succeeding morning I followed her with the captain in the steamboat.

Some ten or fifteen vessels, bound on different voyages, lay in the roads waiting for the pilot boat; and, as she came down the river, they all weighed anchor together and we got under way. It was a beautiful sight—so many sail in close company under a smart breeze, and I stood on the quarter-deck and watched them in a mood of mingled happiness and sadness till we reached the Capes. There was much to elevate and much to depress me. The dream of my lifetime was about to be realized. I was bound to France; and those fair Italian cities, with their world of association and interest were within the limit of a voyage; and all that one looks to for happiness in change of scene, and all that I had been passionately wishing and imagining since I could dream a day-dream or read a book, was before me with a visible certainty; but my home was receding rapidly, perhaps for years, and the chances of death and adversity in my absence crowded upon my mind—and I had left friends—(many—many—as dear to me, any one of them, as the whole sum of my coming enjoyment), whom a thousand possible accidents might remove or estrange; and I scarce knew whether I was more happy or sad.

We made Cape Henlopen about sundown, and all shortened sail and came to. The little boat passed from one to another, taking off the pilots, and in a few minutes every sail was spread again, and away they went with a dashing breeze, some on one course some on another, leaving us in less than an hour, apparently alone on the sea. By this time the clouds had grown black, the wind had strengthened into a gale, with fits of rain; and as the order was given to "close-reef the top-sails," I took a last look at Cape Henlopen, just visible in the far edge of the horizon, and went below.

Oct. 18.—It is a day to make one in love with life. The remains of the long storm, before which we have been driven for a week, lie, in white, turreted masses around the horizon, the sky overhead is spotlessly blue, the sun is warm, the wind steady and fresh, but soft as a child's breath, and the sea—I must sketch it to you more elaborately. We are in the Gulf Stream. The water here as you know, even to the cold banks of Newfoundland, is always blood warm, and the temperature of the air mild at all seasons, and, just now, like a south wind on land in June. Hundreds of sea birds are sailing around us—the spongy sea-weeds, washed from the West Indian rocks, a thousand miles away in the southern latitudes, float by in large masses—the sailors, barefoot and bareheaded, are scattered over the rigging, doing "fair-weather work"—and just in the edge of the horizon, hidden by every swell, stand two vessels with all sail spread, making, with the first fair wind they have had for many days, for America.

This is the first day that I have been able to be long enough on deck to study the sea. Even were it not, however, there has been a constant and chilly rain which would have prevented me from enjoying its grandeur, so that I am reconciled to my unusually severe sickness. I came on deck this morning and looked around, and for an hour or two I could scarce realize that it was not a dream. Much as I had watched the sea from our bold promontory at Nahant, and well as I thought I knew its character in storms and calms, the scene which was before me surprized and bewildered me utterly. At the first glance, we were just in the gorge of the sea; and, looking over the leeward quarter, I saw, stretching up from the keel, what I can only describe as a hill of dazzling blue, thirty or forty feet in real altitude, but sloped so far away that the white crest seemed to me a cloud, and the space between a sky of the most wonderful beauty and brightness. A moment more, and the crest burst over with a splendid volume of foam; the sun struck through the thinner part of the swell in a line of vivid emerald, and the whole mass swept under us, the brig rising and riding on the summit with the buoyancy and grace of a bird.

The single view of the ocean which I got at that moment, will be impressed upon my mind for ever. Nothing that I ever saw on land at all compares with it for splendor. No sunset, no lake scene of hill and water, no fall, not even Niagara, no glen or mountain gap ever approached it. The waves had had no time to "knock down," as the sailors phrase it, and it was a storm at sea without the hurricane and rain. I looked off to the horizon, and the long majestic swells were heaving into the sky upon its distant limit, and between it and my eye lay a radius of twelve miles, an immense plain flashing with green and blue and white, and changing place and color so rapidly as to be almost painful to the sight. I stood holding by the tafferel an hour, gazing on it with a childish delight and wonder. The spray had broken over me repeatedly, and, as we shipped half a sea at the scuppers at every roll, I was standing half the time up to the knees in water; but the warm wind on my forehead, after a week's confinement to my berth, and the excessive beauty lavished upon my sight, were so delicious, that I forgot all, and it was only in compliance with the captain's repeated suggestion that I changed my position.

I mounted the quarter-deck, and, pulling off my shoes, like a schoolboy, sat over the leeward rails, and, with my feet dipping into the warm sea at every lurch, gazed at the glorious show for hours. I do not hesitate to say that the formation, progress, and final burst of a sea-wave, in a bright sun, are the most gorgeously beautiful sight under heaven. I must describe it like a jeweller to you, or I can never convey my impressions.

First of all, a quarter of a mile away to windward, your eye is caught by an uncommonly high wave, rushing right upon your track, and heaping up slowly and constantly as it comes, as if some huge animal were ploughing his path steadily and powerfully beneath the surface. Its "ground," as a painter would say, is of a deep indigo, clear and smooth as enamel, its front curved inward, like a shell, and turned over at the summit with a crest of foam, flashing and changing perpetually in the sunshine, like the sudden outburst of a million of "unsunned diamonds;" and, right through its bosom, as the sea falls off, or the angle of refraction changes, there runs a shifting band of the most vivid green, that you would take to have been the cestus of Venus, as she rose from the sea, it is so supernaturally translucent and beautiful. As it nears you, it looks in shape like the prow of Cleopatra's barge, as they paint it in the old pictures; but its colors, and the grace and majesty of its march, and its murmur (like the low tones of an organ, deep and full, and, to my ear, ten times as articulate and solemn), almost startle you into the belief that it is a sentient being, risen glorious and breathing from the ocean. As it reaches the ship, she rises gradually, for there is apparently an under-wave driven before it, which prepares her for its power; and as it touches the quarter, the whole magnificent wall breaks down beneath you with a deafening surge, and a volume of foam issues from its bosom, green and blue and white, as if it had been a mighty casket in which the whole wealth of the sea, crysoprase, and emerald, and brilliant spars, had been heaped and lavished at a throw. This is the "tenth wave," and, for four or five minutes, the sea will be smooth about you, and the sparkling and dying foam falls into the wake, and may be seen like a white path, stretching away over the swells behind, till you are tired of gazing at it. Then comes another from the same direction, and with the same shape and motion, and so on till the sun sets, or your eyes are blinded and your brain giddy with splendor.

I am sure this language will seem exaggerated to you, but, upon the faith of a lonely man (the captain has turned in, and it is near midnight and a dead calm), it is a mere skeleton, a goldsmith's inventory, of the reality. I long ago learned that first lesson of a man of the world, "to be astonished at nothing," but the sea has overreached my philosophy—quite. I am changed to a mere child in my wonder. Be assured, no view of the ocean from land can give you a shadow of an idea of it. Within even the outermost Capes, the swell is broken, and the color of the water in soundings is essentially different—more dull and earthy. Go to the mineral cabinets of Cambridge or New Haven, and look at the fluor spars, and the turquoises, and the clearer specimens of crysoprase, and quartz, and diamond, and imagine them all polished and clear, and flung at your feet by millions in a noonday sun, and it may help your conceptions of the sea after a storm. You may "swim on bladders" at Nahant and Rockaway till you are gray, and be never the wiser.

The "middle watch" is called, and the second mate, a fine rough old sailor, promoted from "the mast," is walking the quarter-deck, stopping his whistle now and then with a gruff "How do you head?" or "keep her up, you lubber," to the man at the helm; the "silver-shell" of a waning moon, is just visible through the dead lights over my shoulder (it has been up two hours, to me, and by the difference of our present merideans, is just rising now over a certain hill, and peeping softly in at an eastern window that I have watched many a time when its panes have been silvered by the same chaste alchymy), and so after a walk on the deck for an hour to look at the stars and watch the phosphorus in the wake, I think of ——, I'll get to mine own uneven pillow, and sleep too.

LETTER II.

At Sea, October 20.—We have had fine weather for progress, so far, running with north and north-westerly winds from eight to ten knots an hour, and making, of course, over two hundred miles a day. The sea is still rough; and though the brig is light laden and rides very buoyantly, these mounting waves break over us now and then with a tremendous surge, keeping the decks constantly wet, and putting me to many an uncomfortable shiver. I have become reconciled, however, to much that I should have anticipated with no little horror. I can lie in my berth forty-eight hours, if the weather is chill or rainy, and amuse myself very well with talking bad French across the cabin to the captain, or laughing at the distresses of my friend and fellow-passenger, Turk (a fine setter dog, on his first voyage), or inventing some disguise for the peculiar flavor which that dismal cook gives to all his abominations, or, at worst, I can bury my head in my pillow, and brace from one side to the other against the swell, and enjoy my disturbed thoughts—all without losing my temper, or wishing that I had not undertaken the voyage.

Poor Turk! his philosophy is more severely tried. He has been bred a gentleman, and is amusingly exclusive. No assiduities can win him to take the least notice of the crew, and I soon discovered, that, when the captain and myself were below, he endured many a persecution. In an evil hour, a night or two since, I suffered his earnest appeals for freedom to work upon my feelings, and, releasing him from his chain under the windlass, I gave him the liberty of the cabin. He slept very quietly on the floor till about midnight, when the wind rose and the vessel began to roll very uncomfortably. With the first heavy lurch a couple of chairs went tumbling to leeward, and by the yelp of distress, Turk was somewhere in the way. He changed his position, and, with the next roll, the mate's trunk "brought away," and shooting across the cabin, jammed him with such violence against the captain's state-room door, that he sprang howling to the deck, where the first thing that met him was a washing sea, just taken in at midships, that kept him swimming above the hatches for five minutes. Half-drowned, and with a gallon of water in his long hair, he took again to the cabin, and making a desperate leap into the steward's berth, crouched down beside the sleeping creole with a long whine of satisfaction. The water soon penetrated however, and with a "sacré!" and a blow that he will remember for the remainder of the voyage, the poor dog was again driven from the cabin, and I heard no more of him till morning. His decided preference for me has since touched my vanity, and I have taken him under my more special protection—a circumstance which costs me two quarrels a day at least, with the cook and steward.

The only thing which forced a smile upon me during the first week of the passage was the achievement of dinner. In rough weather, it is as much as one person can do to keep his place at the table at all; and to guard the dishes, bottles, and castors, from a general slide in the direction of the lurch, requires a sleight and coolness reserved only for a sailor. "Prenez garde!" shouts the captain, as the sea strikes, and in the twinkling of an eye, everything is seized and held up to wait for the other lurch in attitudes which it would puzzle the pencil of Johnson to exaggerate. With his plate of soup in one hand, and the larboard end of the tureen in the other, the claret bottle between his teeth, and the crook of his elbow caught around the mounting corner of the table, the captain maintains his seat upon the transom, and, with a look of the most grave concern, keeps a wary eye on the shifting level of his vermicelli; the old weather-beaten mate, with the alacrity of a juggler, makes a long leg back to the cabin panels at the same moment, and with his breast against the table, takes his own plate and the castors, and one or two of the smaller dishes under his charge; and the steward, if he can keep his legs, looks out for the vegetables, or if he falls, makes as wide a lap as possible to intercept the volant articles in their descent. "Gentlemen that live at home at ease" forget to thank Providence for the blessings of a permanent level.

Oct. 24.—We are on the Grand Bank, and surrounded by hundreds of sea-birds. I have been watching them nearly all day. Their performances on the wing are certainly the perfection of grace and skill. With the steadiness of an eagle and the nice adroitness of a swallow, they wheel round in their constant circles with an arrowy swiftness, lifting their long tapering pinions scarce perceptibly, and mounting and falling as if by a mere act of volition, without the slightest apparent exertion of power. Their chief enjoyment seems to be to scoop through the deep hollows of the sea, and they do it so quickly that your eye can scarce follow them, just disturbing the polish of the smooth crescent, and leaving a fine line of ripple from swell to swell, but never wetting a wing, or dipping their white breasts a feather too deep in the capricious and wind-driven surface. I feel a strange interest in these wild-hearted birds. There is something in this fearless instinct, leading them away from the protecting and pleasant land to make their home on this tossing and desolate element, that moves both my admiration and my pity. I cannot comprehend it. It is unlike the self-caring instincts of the other families of Heaven's creatures. If I were half the Pythagorean that I used to be, I should believe they were souls in punishment—expiating some lifetime sin in this restless metempsychosis.

Now and then a land-bird has flown on board, driven to sea probably by the gale; and so fatigued as hardly to be able to rise again upon the wing. Yesterday morning a large curlew came struggling down the wind, and seemed to have just sufficient strength to reach the vessel. He attempted to alight on the main yard, but failed and dropped heavily into the long-boat, where he suffered himself to be taken without an attempt to escape. He must have been on the wing two or three days without food, for we were at least two hundred miles from land. His heart was throbbing hard through his ruffled feathers, and he held his head up with difficulty. He was passed aft; but, while I was deliberating on the best means for resuscitating and fitting him to get on the wing again, the captain had taken him from me and handed him over to the cook, who had his head off before I could remember French enough to arrest him. I dreamed all that night of the man "that shot the albatross." The captain relieved my mind, however, by telling me that he had tried repeatedly to preserve them, and that they died invariably in a few hours. The least food, in their exhausted state, swells in their throats and suffocates them. Poor Curlew! there was a tenderness in one breast for him at least—a feeling I have the melancholy satisfaction to know, fully reciprocated by the bird himself—that seat of his affections having been allotted to me for my breakfast the morning succeeding his demise.

Oct. 29.—We have a tandem of whales ahead. They have been playing about the ship an hour, and now are coursing away to the east, one after the other, in gallant style. If we could only get them into traces now, how beautiful it would be to stand in the foretop and drive a degree or two, on a summer sea! It would not be more wonderful, de novo, than the discovery of the lightning-rod, or navigation by steam! And by the way, the sight of these huge creatures has made me realize, for the first time, the extent to which the sea has grown upon my mind during the voyage. I have seen one or two whales, exhibited in the docks, and it seemed to me always that they were monsters—out of proportion, entirely, to the range of the ocean. I had been accustomed to look out to the horizon from land (the radius, of course, as great as at sea), and, calculating the probable speed with which they would compass the intervening space, and the disturbance they would make in doing it, it appeared that in any considerable numbers, they would occupy more than their share of notice and sea-room. Now—after sailing five days, at two hundred miles a day, and not meeting a single vessel—it seems to me that a troop of a thousand might swim the sea a century and chance to be never crossed, so endlessly does this eternal horizon open and stretch away!

Oct. 30.—The day has passed more pleasantly than usual The man at the helm cried "a sail," while we were at breakfast, and we gradually overtook a large ship, standing on the same course, with every sail set. We were passing half a mile to leeward, when she put up her helm and ran down to us, hoisting the English flag. We raised the "star-spangled banner" in answer, and "hove to," and she came dashing along our quarter, heaving most majestically to the sea, till she was near enough to speak us without a trumpet. Her fore-deck was covered with sailors dressed all alike and very neatly, and around the gangway stood a large group of officers in uniform, the oldest of whom, a noble-looking man with gray hair, hailed and answered us. Several ladies stood back by the cabin door—passengers apparently. She was a man of war, sailing as a king's packet between Halifax and Falmouth, and had been out from the former port nineteen days. After the usual courtesies had passed, she bore away a little, and then kept on her course again, the two vessels in company at the distance of half a pistol shot. I rarely have seen a more beautiful sight. The fine effect of a ship under sail is entirely lost to one on board, and it is only at sea and under circumstances like these, that it can be observed. The power of the swell, lifting such a huge body as lightly as an egg-shell on its bosom, and tossing it sometimes half out of the water without the slightest apparent effort, is astonishing. I sat on deck watching her with undiminished interest for hours. Apart from the spectacle, the feeling of companionship, meeting human beings in the middle of the ocean after so long a deprivation of society (five days without seeing a sail, and nearly three weeks unspoken from land), was delightful. Our brig was the faster sailer of the two, but our captain took in some of his canvas for company's sake; and all the afternoon we heard her half-hour bells, and the boatswain's whistle, and the orders of the officers of the deck, and I could distinguish very well, with a glass, the expression of the faces watching our own really beautiful vessel as she skimmed over the water like a bird. We parted at sunset, the man-of-war making northerly for her port, and we stretching south for the coast of France. I watched her till she went over the horizon, and felt as if I had lost friends when the night closed in and we were once more

"Alone on the wide, wide sea."

Nov. 3.—We have just made the port of Havre, and the pilot tells us that the packet has been delayed by contrary winds, and sails early to-morrow morning. The town bells are ringing "nine" (as delightful a sound as I ever heard, to my sea-weary ear), and I close in haste, for all is confusion on board.

LETTER III.

Havre.—This is one of those places which scribbling travellers hurry through with a crisp mention of their arrival and departure, but, as I have passed a day here upon customhouse compulsion, and passed it pleasantly too, and as I have an evening entirely to myself, and a good fire, why I will order another pound of wood (they sell it like a drug here), and Monsieur and Mademoiselle Somebodies, "violin players right from the hands of Paganini, only fifteen years of age, and miracles of music," (so says the placard), may delight other lovers of precocious talent than I. Pen, ink, and paper for No. 2!

If I had not been warned against being astonished, short of Paris, I should have thought Havre quite an affair. I certainly have seen more that is novel and amusing since morning than I ever saw before in any seven days of my life. Not a face, not a building, not a dress, not a child even, not a stone in the street, nor shop, nor woman, nor beast of burden, looks in any comparable degree like its namesake the other side of the water.

It was very provoking to eat a salt supper and go to bed in that tiresome berth again last night, with a French hotel in full view, and no permission to send for a fresh biscuit even, or a cup of milk. It was nine o'clock when we reached the pier, and at that late hour there was, of course, no officer to be had for permission to land; and there paced the patrole, with his high black cap and red pompon, up and down the quay, within six feet of our tafferel, and a shot from his arquebuss would have been the consequence of any unlicensed communication with the shore. It was something, however, to sleep without rocking; and, after a fit of musing anticipation, which kept me conscious of the sentinel's measured tread till midnight, the "gentle goddess" sealed up my cares effectually, and I awoke at sunrise—in France!

It is a common thing enough to go abroad, and it may seem idle and common-place to be enthusiastic about it; but nothing is common or a trifle, to me, that can send the blood so warm to my heart, and the color to my temples as generously, as did my first conscious thought when I awoke this morning. In France. I would not have had it a dream for the price of an empire.

Early in the morning a woman came clattering into the cabin with wooden shoes, and a patois of mingled French and English—a blanchisseuse—spattered to the knees with mud, but with a cap and 'kerchief that would have made the fortune of a New York milliner. Ciel! what politeness! and what white teeth and what a knowing row of papillotes, laid in precise parallel, on her clear brunette temples.

"Quelle nouvelle!" said the captain.

"Poland est a bas!" was the answer, with a look of heroic sorrow, that would have become a tragedy queen, mourning for the loss of a throne. The French manner, for once, did not appear exaggerated. It was news to sadden us all. Pity! pity! that the broad Christian world could look on and see this glorious people trampled to the dust in one of the most noble and desperate struggles for liberty that the earth ever saw! What an opportunity was here lost to France for setting a seal of double truth and splendor on her own newly-achieved triumph over despotism. The washerwoman broke the silence with "Any clothes to wash, Monsieur?" and in the instant return of my thoughts to my own comparatively-pitiful interests, I found the philosophy for all I had condemned in kings—the humiliating and selfish individuality of human nature! And yet I believe with Dr. Channing on that dogma.

At ten o'clock I had performed the traveller's routine—had submitted my trunk and my passport to the three authorities, and had got into (and out of) as many mounting passions at what seemed to me the intolerable impertinencies of searching my linen, and inspecting my person for scars. I had paid the porter three times his due rather than endure his cataract of French expostulation; and with a bunch of keys, and a landlady attached to it, had ascended by a cold, wet, marble staircase, to a parlor and bedroom on the fifth floor: as pretty a place, when you get there, and as difficult to get to as if it were a palace in thin air. It is perfectly French! Fine, old, last-century chairs, covered with splendid yellow damask, two sofas of the same, the legs or arms of every one imperfect; a coarse wood dressing-table, covered with fringed drapery and a sort of throne pincushion, with an immense glass leaning over it, gilded probably in the time of Henri Quatre; artificial flowers all around the room, and prints of Atala and Napoleon mourant over the walls; windows opening to the floor on hinges, damask and muslin curtains inside, and boxes for flower-pots without; a bell-wire that pulls no bell, a bellows too asthmatic even to wheeze, tongs that refuse to meet, and a carpet as large as a table-cloth in the centre of the floor, may answer for an inventory of the "parlor." The bedchamber, about half as large as the boxes in Rattle-row, at Saratoga, opens by folding doors, and discloses a bed, that, for tricksy ornament as well as size, might look the bridal couch for a faery queen in a panorama; the same golden-sprig damask looped over it, tent-fashion, with splendid crimson cord, tassels, fringes, etc., and a pillow beneath that I shall be afraid to sleep on, it is so dainty a piece of needle-work. There is a delusion about it, positively. One cannot help imagining, that all this splendor means something, and it would require a worse evil than any of these little deficiencies of comfort to disturb the self-complacent, Captain-Jackson sort of feeling, with which one throws his cloak on one sofa and his hat on the other, and spreads himself out for a lounge before this mere apology of a French fire.

But, for eating and drinking! if they cook better in Paris, I shall have my passport altered. The next prefet that signs it shall substitute gourmand for proprietaire. I will profess a palate, and live to eat. Making every allowance for an appetite newly from sea, my experience hitherto in this department of science is transcended in the degree of a rushlight to Arcturus.

I strolled about Havre from breakfast till dinner, seven or eight hours, following curiosity at random, up one street and down another, with a prying avidity which I fear travel will wear fast away. I must compress my observations into a sentence or two, for my fire is out, and this old castle of a hotel lets in the wind "shrewdly cold," and, besides, the diligence calls for me in a few hours and one must sleep.

Among my impressions the most vivid are—that, of the twenty thousand inhabitants of Havre, by far the greater portion are women and soldiers—that the buildings all look toppling, and insecurely antique and unsightly—that the privates of the regular army are the most stupid, and those of the national guard the most intelligent-looking troops I ever saw—that the streets are filthy beyond endurance, and the shops clean beyond all praise—that the women do all the buying and selling, and cart-driving and sweeping, and even shoe-making, and other sedentary craftswork, and at the same time have (the meanest of them) an air of ambitious elegance and neatness, that sends your hand to your hat involuntarily when you speak to them—that the children speak French, and look like little old men and women, and the horses, (the famed Norman breed) are the best of draught animals, and the worst for speed in the world—and that, for extremes ridiculously near, dirt and neatness, politeness and knavery, chivalry and petitesse, of bearing and language, the people I have seen to-day must be pre-eminently remarkable, or France, for a laughing philosopher, is a paradise indeed! And now for my pillow, till the diligence calls. Good night.

LETTER IV.

Paris.—It seems to me as if I were going back a month to recall my departure from Havre, my memory is so clouded with later incidents. I was awaked on the morning after I had written to you, by a servant, who brought me at the same time a cup of coffee, and at about an hour before daylight we were passing through the huge gates of the town on our way to Paris. The whole business of diligence-travelling amused me exceedingly. The construction of this vehicle has often been described; but its separate apartments (at four different prices), its enormous size, its comfort and clumsiness, and, more than all, the driving of its postillions, struck me as equally novel and diverting. This last mentioned performer on the whip and voice (the only two accomplishments he at all cultivates), rides one of the three wheel horses, and drives the four or seven which are in advance, as a grazier in our country drives a herd of cattle, and they travel very much in the same manner. There is leather enough in two of their clumsy harnesses, to say nothing of the postillion's boots, to load a common horse heavily. I never witnessed such a ludicrous absence of contrivance and tact as in the appointments and driving of horses in a diligence. It is so in everything in France, indeed. They do not possess the quality as a nation. The story of the Gascoigne, who saw a bridge for the first time, and admired the ingenious economy that placed it across the river, instead of lengthwise, is hardly an exaggeration.

At daylight I found myself in the coupé (a single seat for three in the front of the body of the carriage, with windows before and at the sides), with two whiskered and mustached companions, both very polite, and very unintelligible. I soon suspected, by the science with which my neighbor on the left hummed little snatches of popular operas, that he was a professed singer (a conjecture which proved true), and it was equally clear, from the complexion of the portfeuille on the lap of the other, that his vocation was a liberal one—a conjecture which proved true also, as he confessed himself a diplomat, when we became better acquainted. For the first hour or more my attention was divided between the dim but beautiful outline of the country by the slowly approaching light of the dawn, and my nervousness at the distressing want of skill in the postillion's driving. The increasing and singular beauty of the country, even under the disadvantage of rain and the late season, soon absorbed all my attention, however, and my involuntary and half-suppressed exclamations of pleasure, so unusual in an Englishman (for whom I found I was taken), warmed the diplomatist into conversation, and I passed the three ensuing hours very pleasantly. My companion was on his return from Lithuania, having been sent out by the French committee with arms and money for Poland. He was, of course, a most interesting fellow-traveller; and, allowing for the difficulty with which I understood the language, in the rapid articulation of an enthusiastic Frenchman, I rarely have been better pleased with a chance acquaintance. I found he had been in Greece during the revolution, and knew intimately my friend, Dr. Howe, the best claim he could have on my interest, and, I soon discovered, an answering recommendation of myself to him.

The province of Normandy is celebrated for its picturesque beauty, but I had no conception before of the cultivated picturesque of an old country. I have been a great scenery-hunter in America, and my eye was new, like its hills and forests. The massive, battlemented buildings of the small villages we passed through, the heavy gateways and winding avenues and antique structure of the distant and half-hidden châteaux, the perfect cultivation, and, to me, singular appearance of a whole landscape without a fence or a stone, the absence of all that we define by comfort and neatness, and the presence of all that we have seen in pictures and read of in books, but consider as the representations and descriptions of ages gone by—all seemed to me irresistibly like a dream. I could not rub my hand over my eyes, and realize myself. I could not believe that, within a month's voyage of my home, these spirit-stirring places had stood all my lifetime as they do, and have—for ages—every stone as it was laid in times of worm-eaten history—and looking to my eyes now as they did to the eyes of knights and dames in the days of French chivalry. I looked at the constantly-occurring ruins of the old priories, and the magnificent and still-used churches, and my blood tingled in my veins, as I saw, in the stepping-stones at their doors, cavities that the sandals of monks, and the iron-shod feet of knights in armor a thousand years ago, had trodden and helped to wear, and the stone cross over the threshold, that hundreds of generations had gazed upon and passed under.

By a fortunate chance the postillion left the usual route at Balbec, and pursued what appeared to be a bye-road through the grain-fields and vineyards for twenty or twenty-five miles. I can only describe it as an uninterrupted green lane, winding almost the whole distance through the bosom of a valley that must be one of the very loveliest in the world. Imagine one of such extent, without a fence to break the broad swells of verdure, stretching up from the winding and unenclosed road on either side, to the apparent sky; the houses occurring at distances of miles, and every one with its thatched roof covered all over with bright green moss, and its walls of marl interlaid through all the crevices with clinging vines, the whole structure and its appurtenances faultlessly picturesque, and, when you have conceived a valley that might have contented Rasselas, scatter over it here and there groups of men, women, and children, the Norman peasantry in their dresses of all colors, as you see them in the prints—and if there is anything that can better please the eye, or make the imagination more willing to fold up its wings and rest, my travels have not crossed it. I have recorded a vow to walk through Normandy.

As we approached Rouen the road ascended gradually, and a sharp turn brought us suddenly to the brow of a steep hill, opposite another of the same height, and with the same abrupt descent, at the distance of a mile across. Between, lay Rouen. I hardly know how to describe, for American eyes, the peculiar beauty of this view; one of the most exquisite, I am told, in all France. A town at the foot of a hill is common enough in our country, but of the hundreds that answer to this description, I can not name one that would afford a correct comparison. The nice and excessive cultivation of the grounds in so old a country gives the landscape a complexion essentially different from ours. If there were another Mount Holyoke, for instance, on the other side of the Connecticut, the situation of Northampton would be very similar to that of Rouen; but, instead of the rural village, with its glimpses of white houses seen through rich and luxurious masses of foliage, the mountain sides above broken with rocks, and studded with the gigantic and untouched relics of the native forest, and the fields below waving with heavy crops, irregularly fenced and divided, the whole picture one of an overlavish and half-subdued Eden of fertility—instead of this I say—the broad meadows, with the winding Seine in their bosom, are as trim as a girl's flower-garden, the grass closely cut, and of a uniform surface of green, the edges of the river set regularly with willows, the little bright islands circled with trees, and smooth as a lawn; and instead of green lanes lined with bushes, single streets running right through the unfenced verdure, from one hill to another, and built up with antique structures of stone—the whole looking, in the coup d'œil of distance, like some fantastic model of a town, with gothic houses of sand-paper, and meadows of silk velvet.

You will find the size, population, etc., of Rouen in the guide-books. As my object is to record impressions, not statistics, I leave you to consult those laconic chronicles, or the books of a thousand travellers, for all such information. The Maid of Orleans was burnt here, as you know, in the fourteenth century. There is a statue erected to her memory, which I did not see, for it rained; and after the usual stop of two hours, as the barometer promised no change in the weather, and as I was anxious to be in Paris, I took my place in the night diligence and kept on.

I amused myself till dark, watching the streams that poured into the broad mouth of the postillion's boots from every part of his dress, and musing on the fate of the poor Maid of Orleans; and then, sinking down into the comfortable corner of the coupé, I slept almost without interruption till the next morning—the best comment in the world on the only comfortable thing I have yet seen in France, a diligence.

It is a pleasant thing in a foreign land to see the familiar face of the sun; and, as he rose over a distant hill on the left, I lifted the window of the coupé to let him in, as I would open the door to a long-missed friend. He soon reached a heavy cloud, however, and my hopes of bright weather, when we should enter the metropolis, departed. It began to rain again; and the postilion, after his blue cotton frock was soaked through, put on his greatcoat over it—an economy which is peculiarly French, and which I observed in every succeeding postilion on the route. The last twenty-five miles to Paris are uninteresting to the eye; and with my own pleasant thoughts, tinct as they were with the brightness of immediate anticipation, and an occasional laugh at the grotesque figures and equipages on the road, I made myself passably contented till I entered the suburb of St. Denis.

It is something to see the outside of a sepulchre for kings, and the old abbey of St. Denis needs no association to make a sight of it worth many a mile of weary travel. I could not stop within four miles of Paris, however, and I contented myself with running to get a second view of it in the rain while the postilion breathed his horses. The strongest association about it, old and magnificent as it is, is the fact that Napoleon repaired it after the revolution; and standing in probably the finest point for its front view, my heart leaped to my throat as I fancied that Napoleon, with his mighty thoughts, had stood in that very spot, possibly, and contemplated the glorious old pile before me as the place of his future repose.

After four miles more, over a broad straight avenue, paved in the centre and edged with trees, we arrived at the port of St. Denis. I was exceedingly struck with the grandeur of the gate as we passed under, and, referring to the guide-book, I find it was a triumphal arch erected to Louis XIV., and the one by which the kings of France invariably enter. This also was restored by Napoleon, with his infallible taste, without changing its design: and it is singular how everything that great man touched became his own—for, who remembers for whom it was raised while he is told who employed his great intellect in its repairs?

I entered Paris on Sunday at eleven o'clock. I never should have recognized the day. The shops were all open, the artificers all at work, the unintelligible criers vociferating their wares, and the people in their working-day dresses. We wound through street after street, narrow and dark and dirty, and with my mind full of the splendid views of squares, and columns, and bridges, as I had seen them in the prints, I could scarce believe I was in Paris. A turn brought us into a large court, that of the Messagerie, the place at which all travellers are set down on arrival. Here my baggage was once more inspected, and, after a half-hour's delay, I was permitted to get into a fiacre, and drive to a hotel. As one is a specimen of all, I may as well describe the Hotel d'Etrangers, Rue Vivienne, which, by the way, I take the liberty at the same time to recommend to my friends. It is the precise centre for the convenience of sight-seeing, admirably kept, and, being nearly opposite Galignani's, that bookstore of Europe, is a very pleasant resort for the half hour before dinner, or a rainy day. I went there at the instance of my friend the diplomat.

The fiacre stopped before an arched passage, and a fellow in livery, who had followed me from the Messagerie (probably in the double character of porter and police agent, as my passport was yet to be demanded), took my trunk into a small office on the left, over which was written "Concierge." This person, who is a kind of respectable doorkeeper, addressed me in broken English, without waiting for the evidence of my tongue, that I was a foreigner, and, after inquiring at what price I would have a room, introduced me to the landlady, who took me across a large court (the houses are built round the yard always in France), to the corresponding story of the house. The room was quite pretty, with its looking-glasses and curtains, but there was no carpet, and the fireplace was ten feet deep. I asked to see another, and another, and another; they were all curtains and looking-glasses, and stone-floors! There is no wearying a French woman, and I pushed my modesty till I found a chamber to my taste—a nutshell, to be sure, but carpeted—and bowing my polite housekeeper out, I rang for breakfast and was at home in Paris.

There are few things bought with money that are more delightful than a French breakfast. If you take it at your room, it appears in the shape of two small vessels, one of coffee and one of hot milk, two kinds of bread, with a thin, printed slice of butter, and one or two of some thirty dishes from which you choose, the latter flavored exquisitely enough to make one wish to be always at breakfast, but cooked and composed I know not how or of what. The coffee has an aroma peculiarly exquisite, something quite different from any I ever tasted before; and the petit-pain, a slender biscuit between bread and cake, is, when crisp and warm, a delightful accompaniment. All this costs about one third as much as the beefsteaks and coffee in America, and at the same time that you are waited upon with a civility that is worth three times the money.

It still rained at noon, and, finding that the usual dinner hour was five, I took my umbrella for a walk. In a strange city I prefer always to stroll about at hazard, coming unawares upon what is fine or curious. The hackneyed descriptions in the guidebooks profane the spirit of a place; I never look at them till after I have found the object, and then only for dates. The Rue Vivienne was crowded with people, as I emerged from the dark archway of the hotel to pursue my wanderings.

A walk of this kind, by the way, shows one a great deal of novelty. In France there are no shop-men. No matter what is the article of trade—hats, boots, pictures, books, jewellery, anything or everything that gentlemen buy—you are waited upon by girls, always handsome, and always dressed in the height of the mode. They sit on damask-covered settees, behind the counters; and, when you enter, bow and rise to serve you, with a grace and a smile of courtesy that would become a drawing-room. And this is universal.

I strolled on until I entered a narrow passage, penetrating a long line of buildings. It was thronged with people, and passing in with the rest, I found myself unexpectedly in a scene that equally surprised and delighted me. It was a spacious square enclosed by one entire building. The area was laid out as a garden, planted with long avenues of trees and beds of flowers, and in the centre a fountain was playing in the shape of a fleur-de-lis, with a jet about forty feet in height. A superb colonnade ran round the whole square, making a covered gallery of the lower story, which was occupied by shops of the most splendid appearance, and thronged through its long sheltered pavès by thousands of gay promenaders. It was the far-famed Palais Royal. I remembered the description I had heard of its gambling houses, and facilities for every vice, and looked with a new surprise on its Aladdin-like magnificence. The hundreds of beautiful pillars, stretching away from the eye in long and distant perspective, the crowd of citizens, and women, and officers in full uniform, passing and re-passing with French liveliness and politeness, the long windows of plated glass glittering with jewellery, and bright with everything to tempt the fancy, the tall sentinels pacing between the columns, and the fountain turning over its clear waters with a fall audible above the tread and voices of the thousands who walked around it—who could look upon such a scene and believe it what it is, the most corrupt spot, probably, on the face of the civilized world?

LETTER V.

THE LOUVRE—AMERICANS IN PARIS—POLITICS, ETC.

The salient object in my idea of Paris has always been the Louvre. I have spent some hours in its vast gallery to-day and I am sure it will retain the same prominence in my recollections. The whole palace is one of the oldest, and said to be one of the finest, in Europe; and, if I may judge from its impressiveness, the vast inner court (the façades of which were restored to their original simplicity by Napoleon), is a specimen of high architectural perfection. One could hardly pass through it without being better fitted to see the masterpieces of art within; and it requires this, and all the expansiveness of which the mind is capable besides, to walk through the Musée Royale without the painful sense of a magnificence beyond the grasp of the faculties.

I delivered my passport at the door of the palace, and, as is customary, recorded my name, country, and profession in the book, and proceeded to the gallery. The grand double staircase, one part leading to the private apartments of the royal household, is described voluminously in the authorities; and, truly, for one who has been accustomed to convenient dimensions only, its breadth, its lofty ceilings, its pillars and statuary, its mosaic pavements and splendid windows, are enough to unsettle for ever the standards of size and grandeur. The strongest feeling one has, as he stops half way up to look about him, is the ludicrous disproportion between it and the size of the inhabiting animals. I should smile to see any man ascend such a staircase, except, perhaps, Napoleon.

Passing through a kind of entrance-hall, I came to a spacious salle ronde, lighted from the ceiling, and hung principally with pictures of a large size, one of the most conspicuous of which, "The Wreck," has been copied by an American artist, Mr. Cooke, and is now exhibiting in New York. It is one of the best of the French school, and very powerfully conceived. I regret, however, that he did not prefer the wonderfully fine piece opposite, which is worth all the pictures ever painted in France, "The Marriage Supper at Cana." The left wing of the table, projected toward the spectator, with seven or eight guests who occupy it, absolutely stands out into the hall. It seems impossible that color and drawing upon a flat surface can so cheat the eye.

From the salle ronde, on the right opens the grand gallery, which, after the lesson I had just received in perspective, I took, at the first glance, to be a painting. You will realize the facility of the deception when you consider, that, with a breadth of but forty-two feet, this gallery is one thousand three hundred and thirty-two feet (more than a quarter of a mile) in length. The floor is of tesselated woods, polished with wax like a table; and along its glassy surface were scattered perhaps a hundred visiters, gazing at the pictures in varied attitudes, and with sizes reduced in proportion to their distance, the farthest off looking, in the long perspective, like pigmies of the most diminutive description. It is like a matchless painting to the eye, after all. The ceiling is divided by nine or ten arches, standing each on four Corinthian columns, projecting into the area; and the natural perspective of these, and the artists scattered from one end to the other, copying silently at their easels, and a soldier at every division, standing upon his guard, quite as silent and motionless, would make it difficult to convince a spectator, who was led blindfold and unprepared to the entrance, that it was not some superb diorama, figures and all.

I found our distinguished countryman, Morse, copying a beautiful Murillo at the end of the gallery. He is also engaged upon a Raffaelle for Cooper, the novelist. Among the French artists, I noticed several soldiers, and some twenty or thirty females, the latter with every mark in their countenances of absorbed and extreme application. There was a striking difference in this respect between them and the artists of the other sex. With the single exception of a lovely girl, drawing from a Madonna, by Guido, and protected by the presence of an elderly companion, these lady painters were anything but interesting in their appearance.

Greenough, the sculptor, is in Paris, and engaged just now in taking the bust of an Italian lady. His reputation is now very enviable; and his passion for his art, together with his untiring industry and his fine natural powers, will work him up to something that will, before long, be an honor to our country. If the wealthy men of taste in America would give Greenough liberal orders for his time and talents, and send out Augur, of New Haven, to Italy, they would do more to advance this glorious art in our country, than by expending ten times the sum in any other way. They are both men of rare genius, and both ardent and diligent, and they are both cramped by the universal curse of genius—necessity. The Americans in Paris are deliberating at present on some means for expressing unitedly to our government their interest in Greenough, and their appreciation of his merit of public and private patronage. For the love of true taste, do everything in your power to second such an appeal when it comes.

It is a queer feeling to find oneself a foreigner. One cannot realize, long at a time, how his face or his manners should have become peculiar; and, after looking at a print for five minutes in a shop window, or dipping into an English book, or in any manner throwing off the mental habit of the instant, the curious gaze of the passer by, or the accent of a strange language, strikes one very singularly. Paris is full of foreigners of all nations, and of course, physiognomies of all characters may be met everywhere, but, differing as the European nations do decidedly from each other, they differ still more from the American. Our countrymen, as a class, are distinguishable wherever they are met; not as Americans however, for, of the habits and manners of our country, people know nothing this side the water. But there is something in an American face, of which I never was aware till I met them in Europe, that is altogether peculiar. The French take the Americans to be English: but an Englishman, while he presumes him his countryman, shows a curiosity to know who he is, which is very foreign to his usual indifference. As far as I can analyze it, it is the independent self-possessed bearing of a man unused to look up to any one as his superior in rank, united to the inquisitive, sensitive, communicative expression which is the index to our national character. The first is seldom possessed in England but by a man of decided rank, and the latter is never possessed by an Englishman at all. The two are united in no other nation. Nothing is easier than to tell the rank of an Englishman, and nothing puzzles a European more than to know how to rate the pretensions of an American.

On my way home from the Boulevards this evening, I was fortunate enough to pass through the grand court of the Louvre, at the moment when the moon broke through the clouds that have concealed her own light and the sun's ever since I have been in France. I had often stopped, in passing the sentinels at the entrance, to admire the grandeur of the interior to this oldest of the royal palaces; but to-night, my dead halt within the shadow of the arch, as the view broke upon my eye, and my sudden exclamation in English, startled the grenadier, and he had half presented his musket, when I apologized and passed on. It was magically beautiful indeed! and, with the moonlight pouring obliquely into the sombre area, lying full upon the taller of the three façades, and drawing its soft line across the rich windows and massive pilasters and arches of the eastern and western, while the remaining front lay in the heavy black shadow of relief, it seemed to me more like an accidental regularity in some rocky glen of America, than a pile of human design and proportion. It is strange how such high walls shut out the world. The court of the Louvre is in the very centre of the busiest quarter of Paris, thousands of persons passing and repassing constantly at the extremity of the long arched entrances, and yet, standing on the pavement of that lonely court, no living creature in sight but the motionless grenadiers at either gate, the noises without coming to your ear in a subdued murmur, like the wind on the sea, and nothing visible above but the sky, resting like a ceiling on the lofty walls, the impression of utter solitude is irresistible. I passed out by the archway for which Napoleon constructed his bronze gates, said to be the most magnificent of modern times, and which are now lying in some obscure corner unused, no succeeding power having had the spirit or the will to complete, even by the slight labor that remained, his imperial design. All over Paris you may see similar instances; they meet you at every step: glorious plans defeated; works, that with a mere moiety of what has been already expended in their progress, might be finished with an effect that none but a mind like Napoleon's could have originally projected.

Paris, of course, is rife with politics. There is but one opinion on the subject of another pending revolution. The "people's king" is about as unpopular as he need be for the purposes of his enemies; and he has aggravated the feeling against him very unnecessarily by his late project in the Tuileries. The whole thing is very characteristic of the French people. He might have deprived them of half their civil rights without immediate resistance; but to cut off a strip of the public garden to make a play ground for his children—to encroach a hundred feet on the pride of Paris, the daily promenade of the idlers, who do all the discussion of his measures, it was a little too venturesome. Unfortunately, too, the offence is in the very eye of curiosity, and the workmen are surrounded, from morning till night, by thousands of people, of all classes, gesticulating, and looking at the palace windows and winding themselves gradually up to the revolutionary pitch.

In the event of an explosion, the liberal party will not want partizans, for France is crowded with refugees from tyranny, of every nation. The Poles are flocking hither every day, and the streets are full of their melancholy faces! Poor fellows! they suffer dreadfully from want. The public charity for refugees has been wrung dry long ago, and the most heroic hearts of Poland, after having lost everything but life, in their unavailing struggle, are starving absolutely in the streets. Accident has thrown me into the confidence of a well-known liberal—one of those men of whom the proud may ask assistance without humiliation, and circumstances have thus come to my knowledge, which would move a heart of stone. The fictitious sufferings of "Thaddeus of Warsaw," are transcended in real-life misery every day, and by natures quite as noble. Lafayette, I am credibly assured, has anticipated several years of his income in relieving them; and no possible charity could be so well bestowed as contributions for the Poles, starving in these heartless cities.

I have just heard that Chodsko, a Pole, of distinguished talent and learning, who threw his whole fortune and energy into the late attempted revolution, was arrested here last night, with eight others of his countrymen, under suspicion by the government. The late serious insurrection at Lyons has alarmed the king, and the police is exceedingly strict. The Spanish and Italian refugees, who receive pensions from France, have been ordered off to the provincial towns, by the minister of the interior, and there is every indication of extreme and apprehensive caution. The papers, meantime, are raving against the ministry in the most violent terms, and the king is abused without qualification, everywhere.

I went, a night or two since, to one of the minor theatres to see the representation of a play, which has been performed for the hundred and second time!—"Napoleon at Schoenbrun and St. Helena." My object was to study the feelings of the people toward Napoleon II., as the exile's love for his son is one of the leading features of the piece. It was beautifully played—most beautifully! and I never saw more enthusiasm manifested by an audience. Every allusion of Napoleon to his child, was received with that undertoned, gutteral acclamation, that expresses such deep feeling in a crowd; and the piece is so written that its natural pathos alone is irresistible. No one could doubt for an instant, it seems to me, that the entrance of young Napoleon into France, at any critical moment, would be universally and completely triumphant. The great cry at Lyons was "Vive Napoleon II.!"

I have altered my arrangements a little, in consequence of the state of feeling here. My design was to go to Italy immediately, but affairs promise such an interesting and early change, that I shall pass the winter in Paris.

LETTER VI.

TAGLIONI—FRENCH STAGE, ETC.

I went last night to the French opera, to see the first dancer of the world. The prodigious enthusiasm about her, all over Europe, had, of course, raised my expectations to the highest possible pitch. "Have you seen Taglioni?" is the first question addressed to a stranger in Paris; and you hear her name constantly over all the hum of the cafés and in the crowded resorts of fashion. The house was overflowed. The king and his numerous family were present; and my companion pointed out to me many of the nobility, whose names and titles have been made familiar to our ears by the innumerable private memoirs and autobiographies of the day. After a little introductory piece, the king arrived, and, as soon as the cheering was over, the curtain drew up for "Le Dieu et la Bayadere." This is the piece in which Taglioni is most famous. She takes the part of a dancing girl, of whom the Bramah and an Indian prince are both enamored; the former in the disguise of a man of low rank at the court of the latter, in search of some one whose love for him shall be disinterested. The disguised god succeeds in winning her affection, and, after testing her devotion by submitting for a while to the resentment of his rival, and by a pretended caprice in favor of a singing girl, who accompanies her, he marries her, and then saves her from the flames as she is about to be burned for marrying beneath her caste. Taglioni's part is all pantomime. She does not speak during the play, but her motion is more than articulate. Her first appearance was in a troop of Indian dancing girls, who performed before the prince in the public square. At a signal from the vizier a side pavilion opened, and thirty or forty bayaderes glided out together, and commenced an intricate dance. They were received with a tremendous round of applause from the audience; but, with the exception of a little more elegance in the four who led the dance, they were dressed nearly alike; and as I saw no particularly conspicuous figure, I presumed that Taglioni had not yet appeared. The splendor of the spectacle bewildered me for the first moment or two, but I presently found my eyes rivetted to a childish creature floating about among the rest, and, taking her for some beautiful young elève making her first essays in the chorus, I interpreted her extraordinary fascination as a triumph of nature over my unsophisticated taste; and wondered to myself whether, after all, I should be half so much captivated with the show of skill I expected presently to witness. This was Taglioni! She came forward directly, in a pas seul, and I then observed that her dress was distinguished from that of her companions by its extreme modesty both of fashion and ornament, and the unconstrained ease with which it adapted itself to her shape and motion. She looks not more than fifteen. Her figure is small, but rounded to the very last degree of perfection; not a muscle swelled beyond the exquisite outline; not an angle, not a fault. Her back and neck, those points so rarely beautiful in woman, are faultlessly formed; her feet and hands are in full proportion to her size, and the former play as freely and with as natural a yieldingness in her fairy slippers, as if they were accustomed only to the dainty uses of a drawing-room. Her face is most strangely interesting; not quite beautiful, but of that half-appealing, half-retiring sweetness that you sometimes see blended with the secluded reserve and unconscious refinement of a young girl just "out" in a circle of high fashion. In her greatest exertions her features retain the same timid half smile, and she returns to the alternate by-play of her part without the slightest change of color, or the slightest perceptible difference in her breathing, or in the ease of her look and posture. No language can describe her motion. She swims in your eye like a curl of smoke, or a flake of down. Her difficulty seems to be to keep to the floor. You have the feeling while you gaze upon her, that, if she were to rise and float away like Ariel, you would scarce be surprised. And yet all is done with such a childish unconsciousness of admiration, such a total absence of exertion or fatigue, that the delight with which she fills you is unmingled; and, assured as you are by the perfect purity of every look and attitude, that her hitherto spotless reputation is deserved beyond a breath of suspicion, you leave her with as much respect as admiration; and find with surprise that a dancing girl, who is exposed night after night to the profaning gaze of the world, has crept into one of the most sacred niches of your memory.

I have attended several of the best theatres in Paris, and find one striking trait in all their first actors—nature. They do not look like actors, and their playing is not like acting. They are men, generally, of the most earnest, unstudied simplicity of countenance; and when they come upon the stage, it is singularly without affectation, and as the character they represent would appear. Unlike most of the actors I have seen, too, they seem altogether unaware of the presence of the audience. Nothing disturbs the fixed attention they give to each other in the dialogue, and no private interview between simple and sincere men could be more unconscious and natural. I have formed consequently a high opinion of the French drama, degenerate as it is said to be since the loss of Talma; and it is easy to see that the root of its excellence is in the taste and judgment of the people. They applaud judiciously. When Taglioni danced her wonderful pas seul, for instance, the applause was general and sufficient. It was a triumph of art, and she was applauded as an artist. But when, as the neglected bayadere, she stole from the corner of the cottage, and, with her indescribable grace, hovered about the couch of the disguised Bramah, watching and fanning him while he slept, she expressed so powerfully, by the saddened tenderness of her manner, the devotion of a love that even neglect could not estrange, that a murmur of delight ran through the whole house; and, when her silent pantomime was interrupted by the waking of the god, there was an overwhelming tumult of acclamation that came from the hearts of the audience, and as such must have been both a lesson, and the highest compliment, to Taglioni. An actor's taste is of course very much regulated by that of his audience. He will cultivate that for which he is most praised. We shall never have a high-toned drama in America, while, as at present, applause is won only by physical exertion, and the nice touches of genius and nature pass undetected and unfelt.

Of the French actresses, I have been most pleased with Leontine Fay. She is not much talked of here, and perhaps, as a mere artist in her profession, is inferior to those who are more popular; but she has that indescribable something in her face that has interested me through life—that strange talisman which is linked wisely to every heart, confining its interest to some nice difference invisible to other eyes, and, by a happy consequence, undisputed by other admiration. She, too, has that retired sweetness of look that seems to come only from secluded habits, and in the highly-wrought passages of tragedy, when her fine dark eyes are filled with tears, and her tones, which have never the out-of-doors key of the stage, are clouded and imperfect, she seems less an actress than a refined and lovely woman, breaking through the habitual reserve of society in some agonizing crisis of real life. There are prints of Leontine Fay in the shops, and I have seen them in America, but they resemble her very little.

LETTER VII.

JOACHIM LELEWEL—PALAIS ROYAL—PERE LA CHAISE—VERSAILLES, ETC.

I met, at a breakfast party, to-day, Joachim Lelewel, the celebrated scholar and patriot of Poland. Having fallen in with a great deal of revolutionary and emigrant society since I have been in Paris, I have often heard his name, and looked forward to meeting him with high pleasure and curiosity. His writings are passionately admired by his countrymen. He was the principal of the university, idolized by that effective part of the population, the students of Poland; and the fearless and lofty tone of his patriotic principles is said to have given the first and strongest momentum to the ill-fated struggle just over. Lelewel impressed me very strongly. Unlike most of the Poles, who are erect, athletic, and florid, he is thin, bent, and pale; and were it not for the fire and decision of his eye, his uncertain gait and sensitive address would convey an expression almost of timidity. His form, features, and manners, are very like those of Percival, the American poet, though their countenances are marked with the respective difference of their habits of mind. Lelewel looks like a naturally modest, shrinking man, worked up to the calm resolution of a martyr. The strong stamp of his face is devoted enthusiasm. His eye is excessively bright, but quiet and habitually downcast; his lips are set firmly, but without effort, together; and his voice is almost sepulchral, it is so low and calm. He never breaks through his melancholy, though his refugee countrymen, except when Poland is alluded to, have all the vivacity of French manners, and seem easily to forget their misfortunes. He was silent, except when particularly addressed, and had the air of a man who thought himself unobserved, and had shrunk into his own mind. I felt that he was winning upon my heart every moment. I never saw a man in my life whose whole air and character were so free from self-consciousness or pretension—never one who looked to me so capable of the calm, lofty, unconquerable heroism of a martyr.

"Paris is the centre of the world," if centripetal tendency is any proof of it. Everything struck off from the other parts of the universe flies straight to the Palais Royal. You may meet in its thronged galleries, in the course of an hour, representatives of every creed, rank, nation, and system, under heaven. Hussein Pacha and Don Pedro pace daily the same pavé—the one brooding on a kingdom lost, the other on the throne he hopes to win; the Polish general and the proscribed Spaniard, the exiled Italian conspirator, the contemptuous Turk, the well-dressed negro from Hayti, and the silk-robed Persian, revolve by the hour together around the same jet d'eau, and costumes of every cut and order, mustaches and beards of every degree of ferocity and oddity, press so fast and thick upon the eye that one forgets to be astonished. There are no such things as "lions" in Paris. The extraordinary persons outnumber the ordinary. Every other man you meet would keep a small town in a ferment for a month.

I spent yesterday at Pére la Chaise, and to day at Versailles. The two places are in opposite environs, and of very opposite characters—one certainly making you in love with life, the other almost as certainly with death. One could wander for ever in the wilderness of art at Versailles, and it must be a restless ghost that could not content itself with Pére la Chaise for its elysium.

This beautiful cemetery is built upon the broad ascent of a hill, commanding the whole of Paris at a glance. It is a wood of small trees, laid out in alleys, and crowded with tombs and monuments of every possible description. You will scarce get through without being surprised into a tear; but, if affectation and fantasticalness in such a place do not more grieve than amuse you, you will much oftener smile. The whole thing is a melancholy mock of life. Its distinctions are all kept up. There are the fashionable avenues, lined with costly chapels and monuments, with the names of the exclusive tenants in golden letters upon the doors, iron railings set forbiddingly about the shrubs, and the blessing-scrap writ ambitiously in Latin. The tablets record the long family titles, and the offices and honors, perhaps the numberless virtues of the dead. They read like chapters of heraldry more than like epitaphs. It is a relief to get into the outer alleys, and see how poverty and simple feeling express what should be the same thing. It is usually some brief sentence, common enough, but often exquisitely beautiful in this prettiest of languages, and expressing always the kind of sorrow felt by the mourner. You can tell, for instance, by the sentiment simply, without looking at the record below, whether the deceased was young, or much loved, or mourned by husband, or parent, or brother, or a circle of all. I noticed one, however, the humblest and simplest monument perhaps in the whole cemetery, which left the story beautifully untold; it was a slab of common marl, inscribed "Pauvre Marie!"—nothing more. I have thought of it, and speculated upon it, a great deal since. What was she? and who wrote her epitaph? why was she pauvre Marie?

Before almost all the poorer monuments is a minature garden with a low wooden fence, and either the initials of the dead sown in flowers, or rose-trees, carefully cultivated, trained to hang over the stone. I was surprised to find, in a public cemetery, in December, roses in full bloom and valuable exotics at almost every grave. It speaks both for the sentiment and delicate principle of the people. Few of the more costly monuments were either interesting or pretty. One struck my fancy—a small open chapel, large enough to contain four chairs, with the slab facing the door, and a crucifix encircled with fresh flowers on a simple shrine above. It is a place where the survivors in a family might come and sit at any time, nowhere more pleasantly. From the chapel I speak of, you may look out and see all Paris; and I can imagine how it would lessen the feeling of desertion and forgetfulness that makes the anticipation of death so dreadful, to be certain that your friends would come, as they may here, and talk cheerfully and enjoy themselves near you, so to speak. The cemetery in summer must be one of the sweetest places in the world.

Versailles is a royal summer chateau, about twelve miles from Paris, with a demesne of twenty miles in circumference. Take that for the scale, and imagine a palace completed in proportion, in all its details of grounds, ornament, and architecture. It cost, says the guide book, two hundred and fifty millions of dollars; and, leaving your fancy to expend that trifle over a residence, which, remember, is but one out of some half dozen, occupied during the year by a single family, I commend the republican moral to your consideration, and proceed with the more particular description of my visit.

My friend, Dr. Howe, was my companion. We drove up the grand avenue on one of the loveliest mornings that ever surprised December with a bright sun and a warm south wind. Before us, at the distance of a mile, lay a vast mass of architecture, with the centre, falling back between the two projecting wings, the whole crowning a long and gradual ascent, of which the tri-colored flag waving against the sky from the central turrets was the highest point. As we approached, we noticed an occasional flash in the sun, and a stir of bright colors, through the broad deep court between the wings, which, as we advanced nearer, proved to be a body of about two or three thousand lancers and troops of the line under review. The effect was indescribably fine. The gay uniforms, the hundreds of tall lances, each with its red flag flying in the wind, the imposing crescent of architecture in which the array was embraced, the ringing echo of the grand military music from the towers—and all this intoxication for the positive senses fused with the historical atmosphere of the place, the recollection of the king and queen, whose favorite residence it had been (the unfortunate Louis and Marie Antoinette), or the celebrated women who had lived in their separate palaces within its grounds, of the genius and chivalry of Court after Court that had made it, in turn, the scene of their brilliant follies, and, over all, Napoleon, who must have rode through its gilded gates with the thought of pride that he was its imperial master by the royalty of his great nature alone—it was in truth, enough, the real and the ideal, to dazzle the eyes of a simple republican.

After gazing at the fascinating show for an hour, we took a guide and entered the palace. We were walked through suite after suite of cold apartments, desolately splendid with gold and marble, and crowded with costly pictures, till I was sick and weary of magnificence. The guide went before, saying over his rapid rigmarole of names and dates, giving us about three minutes to a room in which there were some twenty pictures, perhaps, of which he presumed he had told us all that was necessary to know. I fell behind, after a while; and, as a considerable English party had overtaken and joined us, I succeeded in keeping one room in the rear, and enjoying the remainder in my own way.

The little marble palace, called "Petit Trianon," built for Madame Pompadour in the garden grounds, is a beautiful affair, full of what somebody calls "affectionate-looking rooms;" and "Grand Trianon," built also on the grounds at the distance of half a mile, for Madame Maintenon, is a very lovely spot, made more interesting by the preference given to it over all other places by Marie Antoinette. Here she amused herself with her Swiss village. The cottages and artificial "mountains" (ten feet high, perhaps) are exceedingly pretty models in miniature, and probably illustrate very fairly the ideas of a palace-bred fancy upon natural scenery. There are glens and grottoes, and rocky beds for brooks that run at will ("les rivieres à volonté," the guide called them), and trees set out upon the crags at most uncomfortable angles, and every contrivance to make a lovely lawn as inconveniently like nature as possible. The Swiss families, however, must have been very amusing. Brought fresh from their wild country, and set down in these pretty mock cottages, with orders to live just as they did in their own mountains, they must have been charmingly puzzled. In the midst of the village stands an exquisite little Corinthian temple; and our guide informed us that the cottage which the Queen occupied at her Swiss tea-parties was furnished at an expense of sixty thousand francs—two not very Switzer-like circumstances.

It was in the little palace of Trianon that Napoleon signed his divorce from Josephine. The guide showed us the room, and the table on which he wrote. I have seen nothing that brought me so near Napoleon. There is no place in France that could have for me a greater interest. It is a little boudoir, adjoining the state sleeping-room, simply furnished, and made for familiar retirement, not for show. The single sofa—the small round table—the enclosing, tent-like curtains—the modest, unobtrusive elegance of ornaments, and furniture, give it rather the look of a retreat, fashioned by the tenderness and taste of private life, than any apartment in a royal palace. I felt unwilling to leave it. My thoughts were too busy. What was the strongest motive of that great man in this most affecting and disputed action of his life?

After having been thridded through the palaces, we had a few moments left for the grounds. They are magnificent beyond description. We know very little of this thing in America, as an art; but it is one, I have come to think, that, in its requisition of genius, is scarce inferior to architecture. Certainly the three palaces of Versailles together did not impress me so much as the single view from the upper terrace of the gardens. It stretches clear over the horizon. You stand on a natural eminence that commands the whole country, and the plan seems to you like some work of the Titans. The long sweep of the avenue, with a breadth of descent that at the first glance takes away your breath, stretching its two lines of gigantic statues and vases to the water level; the wide, slumbering canal at its foot, carrying on the eye to the horizon, like a river of an even flood lying straight through the bosom of the landscape; the side avenues almost as extensive; the palaces in the distant grounds, and the strange union altogether, to an American, of as much extent as the eye can reach, cultivated equally with the trim elegance of a garden—all these, combining together, form a spectacle which nothing but nature's royalty of genius could design, and (to descend ungracefully from the climax) which only the exactions of an unnatural royalty could pay for.

I think the most forcible lesson one learns at Paris is the value of time and money. I have always been told, erroneously, that it was a place to waste both. You could do so much with another hour, if you had it, and buy so much with another dollar, if you could afford it, that the reflected economy upon what you can command, is inevitable. As to the worth of time, for instance, there are some twelve or fourteen gratuitous lectures every day at the Sorbonne, the School of Medicine and the College of France, by men like Cuvier, Say, Spurzheim, and others, each, in his professed pursuit, the most eminent perhaps in the world; and there are the Louvre, and the Royal Library, and the Mazarin Library, and similar public institutions, all open to gratuitous use, with obsequious attendants, warm rooms, materials for writing, and perfect seclusion; to say nothing of the thousand interesting but less useful resorts with which Paris abounds, such as exhibitions of flowers, porcelains, mosaics, and curious handiwork of every description, and (more amusing and time-killing still) the never-ending changes of sights in the public places, from distinguished foreigners down to miracles of educated monkeys. Life seems most provokingly short as you look at it. Then, for money, you are more puzzled how to spend a poor pitiful franc in Paris (it will buy so many things you want) than you would be in America with the outlay of a month's income. Be as idle and extravagant as you will, your idle hours look you in the face as they pass, to know whether, in spite of the increase of their value, you really mean to waste them; and the money that slipped through your pocket you know not how at home, sticks embarrassed to your fingers, from the mere multiplicity of demands made for it. There are shops all over Paris called the "Vingt-cinq-sous," where every article is fixed at that price—twenty five cents! They contain everything you want, except a wife and fire-wood—the only two things difficult to be got in France. (The latter, with or without a pun, is much the dearer of the two.) I wonder that they are not bought out, and sent over to America on speculation. There is scarce an article in them that would not be held cheap with us at five times its purchase. There are bronze standishes for ink, sand, and wafers, pearl paper-cutters, spice-lamps, decanters, essence-bottles, sets of china, table-bells of all devices, mantel ornaments, vases of artificial flowers, kitchen utensils, dog-collars, canes, guard-chains, chessmen whips, hammers, brushes, and everything that is either convenient or pretty. You might freight a ship with them, and all good and well finished, at twenty-five cents the set or article! You would think the man were joking, to walk through his shop.

LETTER VIII.

DR. BOWRING—AMERICAN ARTISTS—BRUTAL AMUSEMENT, ETC.

I have met Dr. Bowring in Paris, and called upon him to-day with Mr. Morse, by appointment. The translator of the "Ode to the Deity" (from the Russian of Derzhavin) could not by any accident be an ordinary man, and I anticipated great pleasure in his society. He received us at his lodgings in the Place Vendome. I was every way pleased with him. His knowledge of our country and its literature surprised me, and I could not but be gratified with the unprejudiced and well-informed interest with which he discoursed on our government and institutions. He expressed great pleasure at having seen his ode in one of our schoolbooks (Pierpont's Reader, I think), and assured us that the promise to himself of a visit to America was one of his brightest anticipations. This is not at all an uncommon feeling, by the way, among the men of talent in Paris; and I am pleasingly surprised, everywhere, with the enthusiastic hopes expressed for the success of our experiment in liberal principles. Dr. Bowring is a slender man, a little above the middle height, with a keen, inquisitive expression of countenance, and a good forehead, from which the hair is combed straight back all round, in the style of the Cameronians. His manner is all life, and his motion and gesture nervously sudden and angular. He talks rapidly, but clearly, and uses beautiful language—concise, and full of select expressions and vivid figures. His conversation in this particular was a constant surprise. He gave us a great deal of information, and when we parted, inquired my route of travel, and offered me letters to his friends, with a cordiality very unusual on this side the Atlantic.

It is a cold but common rule with travellers in Europe to avoid the society of their own countrymen. In a city like Paris, where time and money are both so valuable, every additional acquaintance, pursued either for etiquette or intimacy, is felt, and one very soon learns to prefer his advantage to any tendency of his sympathies. The infractions upon the rule, however, are very delightful, and, at the general réunion at our ambassador's on Wednesday evening, or an occasional one at Lafayette's, the look of pleasure and relief at beholding familiar faces, and hearing a familiar language once more, is universal. I have enjoyed this morning the double happiness of meeting an American circle, around an American breakfast. Mr. Cooper had invited us (Morse, the artist, Dr. Howe, a gentleman of the navy, and myself). Mr. C. lives with great hospitality, and in all the comfort of American habits; and to find him as he is always found, with his large family about him, is to get quite back to the atmosphere of our country. The two or three hours we passed at his table were, of course, delightful. It should endear Mr. Cooper to the hearts of his countrymen, that he devotes all his influence, and no inconsiderable portion of his large income, to the encouragement of American artists. It would be natural enough, after being so long abroad, to feel or affect a preference for the works of foreigners; but in this, as in his political opinions, most decidedly, he is eminently patriotic. We feel this in Europe, where we discern more clearly by comparison the poverty of our country in the arts, and meet, at the same time, American artists of the first talent, without a single commission from home for original works, copying constantly for support. One of Mr. Cooper's purchases, the "Cherubs," by Greenough, has been sent to the United States, and its merit was at once acknowledged. It was done, however (the artist, who is here, informs me), under every disadvantage of feeling and circumstances; and, from what I have seen and am told by others of Mr. Greenough, it is, I am confident, however beautiful, anything but a fair specimen of his powers. His peculiar taste lies in a bolder range, and he needs only a commission from government to execute a work which will begin the art of sculpture nobly in our country.

My curiosity led me into a strange scene to-day. I had observed for some time among the placards upon the walls an advertisement of an exhibition of "fighting animals," at the Barriére du Combat. I am disposed to see almost any sight once, particularly where it is, like this, a regular establishment, and, of course, an exponent of the popular taste. The place of the "Combats des Animaux," is in one of the most obscure suburbs, outside the walls, and I found it with difficulty. After wandering about in dirty lanes for an hour or two, inquiring for it in vain, the cries of the animals directed me to a walled place, separated from the other houses of the suburb, at the gate of which a man was blowing a trumpet. I purchased a ticket of an old woman who sat shivering in the porter's lodge; and, finding I was an hour too early for the fights, I made interest with a savage-looking fellow, who was carrying in tainted meat, to see the interior of the establishment. I followed him through a side gate, and we passed into a narrow alley, lined with stone kennels, to each of which was confined a powerful dog, with just length of chain enough to prevent him from reaching the tenant of the opposite hole. There were several of these alleys, containing, I should think, two hundred dogs in all. They were of every breed of strength and ferocity, and all of them perfectly frantic with rage or hunger, with the exception of a pair of noble-looking black dogs, who stood calmly at the mouths of their kennels; the rest struggled and howled incessantly, straining every muscle to reach us, and resuming their fierceness toward each other when we had passed by. They all bore, more or less, the marks of severe battles; one or two with their noses split open, and still unhealed; several with their necks bleeding and raw, and galled constantly with the iron collar, and many with broken legs, but all apparently so excited as to be insensible to suffering. After following my guide very unwillingly through the several alleys, deafened with the barking and howling of the savage occupants, I was taken to the department of wild animals. Here were all the tenants of the menagerie, kept in dens, opening by iron doors upon the pit in which they fought. Like the dogs, they were terribly wounded; one of the bears especially, whose mouth was torn all off from his jaws, leaving his teeth perfectly exposed, and red with the continually exuding blood. In one of the dens lay a beautiful deer, with one of his haunches severely mangled, who, the man told me, had been hunted round the pit by the dogs but a day or two before. He looked up at us, with his large soft eye, as we passed, and, lying on the damp stone floor, with his undressed wounds festering in the chilly atmosphere of mid-winter, he presented a picture of suffering which made me ashamed to the soul of my idle curiosity.

The spectators began to collect, and the pit was cleared. Two thirds of those in the amphitheatre were Englishmen, most of whom were amateurs, who had brought dogs of their own to pit against the regular mastiffs of the establishment. These were despatched first. A strange dog was brought in by the collar, and loosed in the arena, and a trained dog let in upon him. It was a cruel business. The sleek, well-fed, good-natured animal was no match for the exasperated, hungry savage he was compelled to encounter. One minute, in all the joy of a release from his chain, bounding about the pit, and fawning upon his master, and the next attacked by a furious mastiff, who was taught to fasten on him at the first onset in a way that deprived him at once of his strength; it was but a murderous exhibition of cruelty. The combats between two of the trained dogs, however, were more equal. These succeeded to the private contests, and were much more severe and bloody. There was a small terrier among them, who disabled several dogs successively, by catching at their fore-legs, and breaking them instantly with a powerful jerk of his body. I was very much interested in one of the private dogs, a large yellow animal, of a noble expression of countenance, who fought several times very unwillingly, but always gallantly and victoriously. There was a majesty about him, which seemed to awe his antagonists. He was carried off in his master's arms, bleeding and exhausted, after punishing the best dogs of the establishment.

The baiting of the wild animals succeeded the canine combats. Several dogs (Irish, I was told), of a size and ferocity such as I had never before seen, were brought in, and held in the leash opposite the den of the bear whose head was so dreadfully mangled.

The door was then opened by the keeper, but poor bruin shrunk from the contest. The dogs became unmanageable at the sight of him, however, and, fastening a chain to his collar, they drew him out by main force, and immediately closed the grating. He fought gallantly, and gave more wounds than he received, for his shaggy coat protected his body effectually. The keepers rushed in and beat off the dogs, when they had nearly finished peeling the remaining flesh from his head; and the poor creature, perfectly blind and mad with pain, was dragged into his den again, to await another day of amusement!

I will not disgust you with more of these details. They fought several foxes and wolves afterward, and, last of all, one of the small donkeys of the country, a creature not so large as some of the dogs, was led in, and the mastiffs loosed upon her. The pity and indignation I felt at first at the cruelty of baiting so unwarlike an animal, I soon found was quite unnecessary. She was the severest opponent the dogs had yet found. She went round the arena at full gallop, with a dozen savage animals springing at her throat, but she struck right and left with her fore-legs, and at every kick with her heels threw one of them clear across the pit. One or two were left motionless on the field, and others carried off with their ribs kicked in, and their legs broken, while their inglorious antagonist escaped almost unhurt. One of the mastiffs fastened on her ear and threw her down, in the beginning of the chase, but she apparently received no other injury.

I had remained till the close of the exhibition with some violence to my feelings, and I was very glad to get away. Nothing would tempt me to expose myself to a similar disgust again. How the intelligent and gentlemanly Englishmen whom I saw there, and whom I have since met in the most refined society of Paris, can make themselves familiar, as they evidently were, with a scene so brutal, I cannot very well conceive.

LETTER IX.

MALIBRAN—PARIS AT MIDNIGHT—A MOB, ETC.

Our beautiful and favorite Malibran is playing in Paris this winter. I saw her last night in Desdemona. The other theatres are so attractive, between Taglioni, Robert le Diable (the new opera), Leontine Fay, and the political pieces constantly coming out, that I had not before visited the Italian opera. Madame Malibran is every way changed. She sings, unquestionably, better than when in America. Her voice is firmer, and more under control, but it has lost that gushing wildness, that brilliant daringness of execution, that made her singing upon our boards so indescribably exciting and delightful. Her person is perhaps still more changed. The round, graceful fulness of her limbs and features has yielded to a half-haggard look of care and exhaustion, and I could not but think that there was more than Desdemona's fictitious wretchedness in the expression of her face. Still, her forehead and eyes have a beauty that is not readily lost, and she will be a strikingly interesting, and even splendid creature, as long as she can play. Her acting was extremely impassioned; and in the more powerful passages of her part, she exceeded everything I had conceived of the capacity of the human voice for pathos and melody. The house was crowded, and the applause was frequent and universal.

Madame Malibran, as you probably know, is divorced from the man whose name she bears, and has married a violinist of the Italian orchestra. She is just now in a state of health that will require immediate retirement from the stage, and, indeed, has played already too long. She came forward after the curtain dropped, in answer to the continual demand of the audience, leaning heavily on Rubini, and was evidently so exhausted as to be scarcely able to stand. She made a single gesture, and was led off immediately, with her head drooping on her breast, amid the most violent acclamations. She is a perfect passion with the French, and seems to have out-charmed their usual caprice.

It was a lovely night, and after the opera I walked home. I reside a long distance from the places of public amusement. Dr. Howe and myself had stopped at a café on the Italian Boulevards an hour, and it was very late. The streets were nearly deserted—here and there a solitary cabriolet with the driver asleep under his wooden apron, or the motionless figure of a municipal guardsman, dozing upon his horse, with his helmet and brazen armor glistening in the light of the lamps. Nothing has impressed me more, by the way, than a body of these men passing me in the night. I have once or twice met the King returning from the theatre with a guard, and I saw them once at midnight on an extraordinary patrol winding through the arch into the Place Carrousel. Their equipments are exceedingly warlike (helmets of brass, and coats of mail), and, with the gleam of the breast-plates through their horsemen's cloaks, the tramp of hoofs echoing through the deserted streets, and the silence and order of their march, it was quite a realization of the descriptions of chivalry.

We kept along the Boulevards to the Rue Richelieu. A carriage, with footmen in livery, had just driven up to Frascati's, and, as we passed, a young man of uncommon personal beauty jumped out and entered that palace of gamblers. By his dress he was just from a ball, and the necessity of excitement after a scene meant to be so gay, was an obvious if not a fair satire on the happiness of the "gay" circle in which he evidently moved. We turned down the Passage Panorama, perhaps the most crowded thoroughfare in all Paris, and traversed its long gallery without meeting a soul. The widely-celebrated patisserie of Felix, the first pastry-cook in the world, was the only shop open from one extremity to the other. The guard, in his gray capote, stood looking in at the window, and the girl, who had served the palates of half the fashion and rank of Paris since morning, sat nodding fast asleep behind the counter, paying the usual fatiguing penalty of notoriety. The clock struck two as we passed the façade of the Bourse. This beautiful and central square is, night and day, the grand rendezvous of public vice; and late as the hour was, its pavé was still thronged with flaunting and painted women of the lowest description, promenading without cloaks or bonnets, and addressing every passer-by.

The Palais Royal lay in our way, just below the Bourse, and we entered its magnificent court with an exclamation of new pleasure. Its thousand lamps were all burning brilliantly, the long avenues of trees were enveloped in a golden atmosphere created by the bright radiation of light through the mist, the Corinthian pillars and arches retreated on either side from the eye in distinct and yet mellow perspective, the fountain filled the whole palace with its rich murmur, and the broad marble-paved galleries, so thronged by day, were as silent and deserted as if the drowsy gens d'armes standing motionless on their posts were the only living beings that inhabited it. It was a scene really of indescribable impressiveness. No one who has not seen this splendid palace, enclosing with its vast colonnades so much that is magnificent, can have an idea of its effect upon the imagination. I had seen it hitherto only when crowded with the gay and noisy idlers of Paris, and the contrast of this with the utter solitude it now presented—not a single footfall to be heard on its floors, yet every lamp burning bright, and the statues and flowers and fountains all illuminated as if for a revel—was one of the most powerful and captivating that I have ever witnessed. We loitered slowly down one of the long galleries, and it seemed to me more like some creation of enchantment than the public haunt it is of pleasure and merchandise. A single figure, wrapped in a cloak, passed hastily by us and entered the door to one of the celebrated "hells," in which the playing scarce commences till this hour—but we met no other human being.

We passed on from the grand court to the Galerie Nemours. This, as you may find in the descriptions, is a vast hall, standing between the east and west courts of the Palais Royal. It is sometimes called the "glass gallery." The roof is of glass, and the shops, with fronts entirely of windows, are separated only by long mirrors, reaching in the shape of pillars from the roof to the floor. The pavement is tesselated, and at either end stand two columns completing its form, and dividing it from the other galleries into which it opens. The shops are among the costliest in Paris; and what with the vast proportions of the hall, its beautiful and glistening material, and the lightness and grace of its architecture, it is, even when deserted, one of the most fairy-like places in this fantastic city. It is the lounging place of military men particularly; and every evening from six to midnight, it is thronged by every class of gayly dressed people, officers off duty, soldiers, polytechnic scholars, ladies, and strangers of every costume and complexion, promenading to and fro in the light of the cafés and the dazzling shops, sheltered completely from the weather, and enjoying, without expense or ceremony, a scene more brilliant than the most splendid ball-room in Paris. We lounged up and down the long echoing pavement an hour. It was like some kingly "banquet hall deserted." The lamps burned dazzlingly bright, the mirrors multiplied our figures into shadowy and silent attendants, and our voices echoed from the glittering roof in the utter stillness of the hour, as if we had broken in, Thalaba-like, upon some magical palace of silence.

It is singular how much the differences of time and weather affect scenery. The first sunshine I saw in Paris, unsettled all my previous impressions completely. I had seen every place of interest through the dull heavy atmosphere of a week's rain, and it was in such leaden colors alone that the finer squares and palaces had become familiar to me. The effect of a clear sun upon them was wonderful. The sudden gilding of the dome of the Invalides by Napoleon must have been something like it. I took advantage of it to see everything over again, and it seemed to me like another city. I never realized so forcibly the beauty of sunshine. Architecture, particularly, is nothing without it. Everything looks heavy and flat. The tracery of the windows and relievos, meant to be definite and airy, appears clumsy and confused, and the whole building flattens into a solid mass, without design or beauty.

I have spent the whole day in a Paris mob. The arrival of General Romarino and some of his companions from Warsaw, gave the malcontents a plausible opportunity of expressing their dislike to the measures of government; and, under cover of a public welcome to this distinguished Pole, they assembled in immense numbers at the Port St. Denis, and on the Boulevard Montmartre. It was very exciting altogether. The cavalry were out, and patroled the streets in companies, charging upon the crowd wherever there was a stand; the troops of the line marched up and down the Boulevards, continually dividing the masses of people, and forbidding any one to stand still. The shops were all shut, in anticipation of an affray. The students endeavored to cluster, and resisted, as far as they dared, the orders of the soldiery; and from noon till night there was every prospect of a quarrel. The French are a fine people under excitement. Their handsome and ordinarily heartless faces become very expressive under the stronger emotions; and their picturesque dresses and violent gesticulation, set off a popular tumult exceedingly. I have been highly amused all day, and have learned a great deal of what it is very difficult for a foreigner to acquire—the language of French passion. They express themselves very forcibly when angry. The constant irritation kept up by the intrusion of the cavalry upon the sidewalks, and the rough manner of dispersing gentlemen by sabre-blows and kicks with the stirrup, gave me sufficient opportunity of judging. I was astonished, however, that their summary mode of proceeding was borne at all. It is difficult to mix in such a vast body, and not catch its spirit, and I found myself, without knowing why, or rather with a full conviction that the military measures were necessary and right, entering with all my heart into the rebellious movements of the students, and boiling with indignation at every dispersion by force. The students of Paris are probably the worst subjects the king has. They are mostly young men of from twenty to twenty-five, full of bodily vigor and enthusiasm, and excitable to the last degree. Many of them are Germans, and no small proportion Americans. They make a good amalgam for a mob, dress being the last consideration, apparently, with a medical or law student in Paris. I never saw such a collection of atrocious-looking fellows as are to be met at the lectures. The polytechnic scholars, on the other hand, are the finest-looking body of young men I ever saw. Aside from their uniform, which is remarkably neat and beautiful, their figures and faces seem picked for spirit and manliness. They have always a distinguished air in a crowd, and it is easy, after seeing them, to imagine the part they played as leaders in the revolution of the three days.

Contrary to my expectation, night came on without any serious encounter. One or two individuals attempted to resist the authority of the troops, and were considerably bruised; and one young man, a student, had three of his fingers cut off by the stroke of a dragoon's sabre. Several were arrested, but by eight o'clock all was quiet, and the shops on the Boulevards once more exposed their tempting goods, and lit up their brilliant mirrors without fear. The people thronged to the theatres to see the political pieces, and evaporate their excitement in cheers at the liberal allusions; and so ends a tumult that threatened danger, but operated, perhaps, as a healthful vent for the accumulating disorders of public opinion.

LETTER X.

GARDEN OF THE TUILERIES—FASHIONABLE DRIVES—FRENCH OMNIBUSES—CHEAP RIDING—SIGHTS—STREET-BEGGARS—IMPOSTORS, ETC.

The garden of the Tuileries is an idle man's paradise. Magnificent as it is in extent, sculptures, and cultivation, we all know that statues may be too dumb, gravel walks too long and level, and trees and flowers and fountains a little too Platonic, with any degree of beauty. But the Tuileries are peopled at all hours of sunshine with, to me, the most lovely objects in the world—children. You may stop a minute, perhaps, to look at the thousand gold fishes in the basin under the palace-windows, or follow the swans for a single voyage round the fountain in the broad avenue—but you will sit on your hired chair (at this season) under the shelter of the sunny wall, and gaze at the children chasing about, with their attending Swiss maids, till your heart has outwearied your eyes, or the palace-clock strikes five. I have been there repeatedly since I have been in Paris, and have seen nothing like the children. They move my heart always, more than anything under heaven; but a French child, with an accent that all your paid masters cannot give, and manners, in the midst of its romping, that mock to the life the air and courtesy for which Paris has a name over the world, is enough to make one forget Napoleon, though the column of Vendome throws its shadow within sound of their voices. Imagine sixty-seven acres of beautiful creatures (that is the extent of the garden, and I have not seen such a thing as an ugly French child)—broad avenues stretching away as far as you can see, covered with little foreigners (so they seem to me), dressed in gay colors, and laughing and romping and talking French, in all the amusing mixture of baby passions and grown-up manners, and answer me—is it not a sight better worth seeing than all the grand palaces that shut it in?

The Tuileries are certainly very magnificent, and, to walk across from the Seine to the Rue Rivoli, and look up the endless walks and under the long perfect arches cut through the trees, may give one a very pretty surprise for once—but a winding lane is a better place to enjoy the loveliness of green leaves, and a single New England elm, letting down its slender branches to the ground in the inimitable grace of nature, has, to my eye, more beauty than all the clipped vistas from the king's palace to the Arc de l'Etoile, the Champs Elysées inclusive.

One of the finest things in Paris, by the way, is the view from the terrace in front of the palace to this "Arch of Triumph," commenced by Napoleon at the extremity of the "Elysian Fields," a single avenue of about two miles. The part beyond the gardens is the fashionable drive, and, by a saunter on horseback to the Bois de Boulogne, between four and five, on a pleasant day, one may see all the dashing equipages in Paris. Broadway, however, would eclipse everything here, either for beauty of construction or appointments. Our carriages are every way handsomer and better hung, and the horses are harnessed more compactly and gracefully. The lumbering vehicles here make a great show, it is true—for the box, with its heavy hammer-cloth, is level with the top, and the coachman and footmen and outriders are very striking in their bright liveries; but the elegant, convenient, light-running establishments of Philadelphia and New York, excel them, out of all comparison, for taste and fitness. The best driving I have seen is by the king's whips, and really it is beautiful to see his retinue on the road, four or five coaches and six, with footmen and outriders in scarlet liveries, and the finest horses possible for speed and action. His majesty generally takes the outer edge of the Champs Elysées, on the bank of the river, and the rapid glimpses of the bright show through the breaks in the wood, are exceedingly picturesque.

There is nothing in Paris that looks so outlandish to my eye as the common vehicles. I was thinking of it this morning as I stood waiting for the St. Sulpice omnibus, at the corner of the Rue Vivienne, the great thoroughfare between the Boulevards and the Palais Royal. There was the hack-cabriolet lumbering by in the fashion of two centuries ago, with a horse and harness that look equally ready to drop in pieces; the hand-cart with a stout dog harnessed under the axle-tree, drawing with twice the strength of his master; the market-waggon, driven always by women, and drawn generally by a horse and mule abreast, the horse of the Norman breed, immensely large, and the mule about the size of a well-grown bull-dog; a vehicle of which I have not yet found out the name, a kind of demi-omnibus, with two wheels and a single horse, and carrying nine; and last, but not least amusing, a small close carriage for one person, swung upon two wheels and drawn by a servant, very much used, apparently, by elderly women and invalids, and certainly most admirable conveniences either for the economy or safety of getting about a city. It would be difficult to find an American servant who would draw in harness as they do here; and it is amusing to see a stout, well-dressed fellow, strapped to a carriage, and pulling along the pavés, sometimes at a jog-trot, while his master or mistress sits looking unconcernedly out of the window.

I am not yet decided whether the French are the best or the worst drivers in the world. If the latter they certainly have most miraculous escapes. A cab-driver never pulls the reins except upon great emergencies, or for a right-about turn, and his horse has a most ludicrous aversion to a straight line. The streets are built inclining toward the centre, with the gutter in the middle, and it is the habit of all cabriolet-horses to run down one side and up the other constantly at such sudden angles that it seems to you they certainly will go through the shop windows. This, of course, is very dangerous to foot-passengers in a city where there are no side-walks; and, as a consequence, the average number of complaints to the police of Paris for people killed by careless driving, is about four hundred annually. There are probably twice the number of legs broken. One becomes vexed in riding with these fellows, and I have once or twice undertaken to get into a French passion, and insist upon driving myself. But I have never yet met with an accident. "Gar-r-r-r-e!" sings out the driver, rolling the word off his tongue like a bullet from a shovel, but never thinking to lift his loose reins from the dasher, while the frightened passenger, without looking round, makes for the first door with an alacrity that shows a habit of expecting very little from the cocher's skill.

Riding is very cheap in Paris, if managed a little. The city is traversed constantly in every direction by omnibuses, and you may go from the Tuileries to Père la Chaise, or from St. Sulpice to the Italian Boulevards (the two diagonals), or take the "Tous les Boulevards" and ride quite round the city for six sous the distance. The "fiacre" is like our own hacks, except that you pay but "twenty sous the course," and fill the vehicle with your friends if you please; and, more cheap and comfortable still, there is the universal cabriolet, which for "fifteen sous the course," or "twenty the hour," will give you at least three times the value of your money, with the advantage of seeing ahead and talking bad French with the driver.

Everything in France is either grotesque or picturesque. I have been struck with it this morning, while sitting at my window, looking upon the close inner court of the hotel. One would suppose that a pavé between four high walls, would offer very little to seduce the eye from its occupation; but on the contrary, one's whole time may be occupied in watching the various sights presented in constant succession. First comes the itinerant cobbler, with his seat and materials upon his back, and coolly selecting a place against the wall, opens his shop under your window, and drives his trade, most industriously, for half an hour. If you have anything to mend, he is too happy; if not he has not lost his time, for he pays no rent, and is all the while at work. He packs up again, bows to the concierge, as politely as his load will permit, and takes his departure, in the hope to find your shoes more worn another day. Nothing could be more striking than his whole appearance. He is met in the gate, perhaps, by an old clothes man, who will buy or sell, and compliment you for nothing, cheapening your coat by calling the Virgin to witness that your shape is so genteel that it will not fit one man in a thousand; or by a family of singers, with a monkey to keep time; or a regular beggar, who, however, does not dream of asking charity till he has done something to amuse you; after these, perhaps, will follow a succession of objects singularly peculiar to this fantastic metropolis; and if one could separate from the poor creatures the knowledge of the cold and hunger they suffer, wandering about, houseless, in the most inclement weather, it would be easy to imagine it a diverting pantomime, and give them the poor pittance they ask, as the price of an amused hour. An old man has just gone from the court who comes regularly twice a week, with a long beard, perfectly white, and a strange kind of an equipage. It is an organ, set upon a rude carriage, with four small wheels, and drawn by a mule, of the most diminutive size, looking (if it were not for the venerable figure crouched upon the seat) like some roughly-contrived plaything. The whole affair, harness and all, is evidently his own work; and it is affecting to see the difficulty, and withal, the habitual apathy with which the old itinerant fastens his rope-reins beside him, and dismounts to grind his one—solitary—eternal tune, for charity.

Among the thousands of wretched objects in Paris (they make the heart sick with their misery at every turn), there is, here and there, one of an interesting character; and it is pleasant to select them, and make a habit of your trifling gratuity. Strolling about, as I do, constantly, and letting everybody and everything amuse me that will, I have made several of these penny-a-day acquaintances, and find them very agreeable breaks to the heartless solitude of a crowd. There is a little fellow who stands by the gate of the Tuileries, opening to the Place Vendome, who, with all the rags and dirt of a street-boy, begs with an air of superiority that is absolutely patronizing. One feels obliged to the little varlet for the privilege of giving to him—his smile and manner are so courtly. His face is beautiful, dirty as it is; his voice is clear, and unaffected, and his thin lips have an expression of high-bred contempt, that amuses me a little, and puzzles me a great deal. I think he must have gentleman's blood in his veins, though he possibly came indirectly by it. There is a little Jewess hanging about the Louvre, who begs with her dark eyes very eloquently; and in the Rue de la Paix there may be found at all hours, a melancholy, sick-looking Italian boy, with his hand in his bosom, whose native language and picture-like face are a diurnal pleasure to me, cheaply bought with the poor trifle which makes him happy. It is surprising how many devices there are in the streets for attracting attention and pity. There is a woman always to be seen upon the Boulevards, playing a solemn tune on a violin, with a child as pallid as ashes, lying, apparently, asleep in her lap. I suspected, after seeing it once or twice, that it was wax, and a day or two since I satisfied myself of the fact, and enraged the mother excessively by touching its cheek. It represents a sick child to the life, and any one less idle and curious would be deceived. I have often seen people give her money with the most unsuspecting look of sympathy, though it would be natural enough to doubt the maternal kindness of keeping a dying child in the open air in mid-winter. Then there is a woman without hands, making braid with wonderful adroitness; and a man without legs or arms, singing, with his hat set appealingly on the ground before him; and cripples, exposing their abbreviated limbs, and telling their stories over and over, with or without listeners, from morning till night; and every description of appeal to the most acute sympathies, mingled with all the gayety, show, and fashion, of the most crowded promenade in Paris.

In the present dreadful distress of trade, there are other still more painful cases of misery. It is not uncommon to be addressed in the street by men of perfectly respectable appearance, whose faces bear every mark of strong mental struggle, and often of famishing necessity, with an appeal for the smallest sum that will buy food. The look of misery is so general, as to mark the whole population. It has struck me most forcibly everywhere, notwithstanding the gayety of the national character, and, I am told by intelligent Frenchmen, it is peculiar to the time, and felt and observed by all. Such things startle one back to nature sometimes. It is difficult to look away from the face of a starving man, and see the splendid equipages, and the idle waste upon trifles, within his very sight, and reconcile the contrast with any belief of the existence of human pity—still more difficult, perhaps, to admit without reflection, the right of one human being to hold in a shut hand, at will, the very life and breath for which his fellow-creatures are perishing at his door. It is this that is visited back so terribly in the horrors of a revolution.

LETTER XI.

FOYETIÉR—THE THRACIAN GLADIATOR—MADEMOISELLE MARS—DOCTOR FRANKLIN'S RESIDENCE IN PARIS—ANNUAL BALL FOR THE POOR.

I had the pleasure to day of being introduced to the young sculptor Foyetiér, the author of the new statue on the terrace of the Tuileries. Aside from his genius, he is interesting from a circumstance connected with his early history. He was a herd-driver in one of the provinces, and amused himself in his leisure moments with the carving of rude images, which he sold for a sous or two on market-days in the provincial town. The celebrated Dr. Gall fell in with him accidentally, and felt of his head, en passant. The bump was there which contains his present greatness, and the phrenologist took upon himself the risk of his education in the arts. He is now the first sculptor, beyond all competition, in France. His "Spartacus," the Thracian gladiator, is the admiration of Paris. It stands in front of the palace, in the most conspicuous part of the regal gardens, and there are hundreds of people about the pedestal at all hours of the day. The gladiator has broken his chain, and stands with his weapon in his hand, every muscle and feature breathing action, his body thrown back, and his right foot planted powerfully for a spring. It is a gallant thing. One's blood stirs to look at it.

Foyetiér is a young man, I should think about thirty. He is small, very plain in appearance; but he has a rapid, earnest eye, and a mouth of singular suavity of expression. I liked him extremely. His celebrity seems not to have trenched a step on the nature of his character. His genius is everywhere allowed, and he works for the king altogether, his majesty bespeaking everything he attempts, even in the model; but he is, certainly, of all geniuses, one of the most modest.

The celebrated Mars has come out from her retirement once more, and commenced an engagement at the Theatre Français. I went a short time since to see her play in Tartuffe. This stage is the home of the true French drama. Here Talma played when he and Mademoiselle Mars were the delight of Napoleon and of France. I have had few gratifications greater than that of seeing this splendid woman re-appear in the place were she won her brilliant reputation. The play, too, was Moliere's, and it was here that it was first performed. Altogether it was like something plucked back from history; a renewal, as in a magic mirror, of glories gone by.

I could scarce believe my eyes when she appeared as the "wife of Argon." She looked about twenty-five. Her step was light and graceful; Her voice was as unlike that of a woman of sixty as could well be imagined; sweet, clear, and under a control which gives her a power of expression I never had conceived before; her mouth had the definite, firm play of youth; her teeth (though the dentist might do that) were white and perfect, and her eyes can have lost none of their fire, I am sure. I never saw so quiet a player. Her gestures were just perceptible, no more; and yet they were done so exquisitely at the right moment—so unconsciously, as if she had not meant them, that they were more forcible than even the language itself. She repeatedly drew a low murmur of delight from the whole house with a single play of expression across her face, while the other characters were speaking, or by a slight movement of her fingers, in pantomimic astonishment or vexation. It was really something new to me. I had never before seen a first-rate female player in comedy. Leontine Fay is inimitable in tragedy; but, if there be any comparison between them, it is that this beautiful young creature overpowers the heart with her nature, while Mademoiselle Mars satisfies the uttermost demand of the judgment with her art.

I yesterday visited the house occupied by Franklin while he was in France. It is one of the most beautiful country residences in the neighborhood of Paris, standing on the elevated ground of Passy, and overlooking the whole city on one side, and the valley of the Seine for a long distance toward Versailles on the other. The house is otherwise celebrated. Madame de Genlis lived there while the present king was her pupil; and Louis XV. occupied it six months for the country air, while under the infliction of the gout—its neighborhood to the palace probably rendering it preferable to the more distant chateaux of St. Cloud or Versailles. Its occupants would seem to have been various enough, without the addition of a Lieutenant-General of the British army, whose hospitality makes it delightful at present. The lightning-rod, which was raised by Franklin, and which was the first conductor used in France, is still standing. The gardens are large, and form a sort of terrace, with the house on the front edge. It must be one of the sweetest places in the world in summer.

The great annual ball for the poor was given at the Academie Royale, a few nights since. This is attended by the king and royal family, and is ordinarily the most splendid affair of the season. It is managed by twenty or thirty lady-patronesses, who have the control of the tickets; and, though by no means exclusive, it is kept within very respectable limits; and, if one is content to float with the tide, and forego dancing, is an unusually comfortable and well-behaved spectacle.

I went with a large party at the early hour of eight. We fell into the train of carriages, advancing slowly between files of dragoons, and stood before the door in our turn in the course of an hour. The staircases were complete orangeries, with immense mirrors at every turn, and soldiers on guard, and servants in livery, from top to bottom. The long saloon, lighted by ten chandeliers, was dressed and hung with wreaths as a receiving-room; and passing on through the spacious lobbies, which were changed into groves of pines and exotics, we entered upon the grand scene. The coup d'œil would have astonished Aladdin. The theatre, which is the largest in Paris, and gorgeously built and ornamented, was thrown into one vast ball-room, ascending gradually from the centre to platforms raised at either end, one of which was occupied by the throne and seats for the king's family and suite. The four rows of boxes were crowded with ladies, and the house presented, from the floor to the paradis, one glittering and waving wall of dress, jewelry, and feathers. An orchestra of near a hundred musicians occupied the centre of the hall; and on either side of them swept by the long, countless multitudes of people, dressed with a union of taste and show; while, instead of the black coats which darken the complexion of a party in a republican country, every other gentleman was in a gay uniform; and polytechnic scholars, with their scarlet-faced coats, officers of the "National Guard" and the "line," gentlemen of the king's household, and foreign ministers, and attachés, presented a variety of color and splendor which nothing could exceed.

The theatre itself was not altered, except by the platform occupied by the king; it is sufficiently splendid as it stands; but the stage, whose area is much larger than that of the pit, was hung in rich drapery as a vast tent, and garnished to profusion with flags and arms. Along the sides, on a level with the lower row of boxes, extended galleries of crimson velvet, festooned with flowers. These were filled with ladies, and completed a circle about the house of beauty and magnificence, of which the king and his dazzling suite formed the corona. Chandeliers were hung close together from one end of the hall to the other. I commenced counting them once or twice, but some bright face flitting by in the dance interrupted me. An English girl near me counted fifty-five, and I think there must have been more. The blaze of light was almost painful. The air glittered, and the fine grain of the most delicate complexions was distinctly visible. It is impossible to describe the effect of so much light and space and music crowded into one spectacle. The vastness of the hall, so long that the best sight could not distinguish a figure at the opposite extremity, and so high as to absorb and mellow the vibration of a hundred instruments—the gorgeous sweep of splendor from one platform to the other, absolutely drowning the eye in a sea of gay colors, nodding feathers, jewelry, and military equipment—the delicious music, the strange faces, dresses, and tongues, (one-half of the multitude at least being foreigners), the presence of the king, and the gallant show of uniforms in his conspicuous suite, combined to make up a scene more than sufficiently astonishing. I felt the whole night the smothering consciousness of senses too narrow—eyes, ears, language, all too limited for the demand made upon them.

The king did not arrive till after ten. He entered by a silken curtain in the rear of the platform on which seats were placed for his family. The "Vive le Roi" was not so hearty as to drown the music, but his majesty bowed some twenty times very graciously, and the good-hearted queen curtsied, and kept a smile on her excessively plain face, till I felt the muscles of my own ache for her. King Philippe looks anxious. By the remarks of the French people about me when he entered, he has reason for it. I observed that the polytechnic scholars all turned their backs upon him; and one exceedingly handsome, spirited-looking boy, standing just at my side, muttered a "sacré!" and bit his lip, with a very revolutionary air, at the continuance of the acclamation. His majesty came down, and walked through the hall about midnight. His eldest son, the Duke of Orleans, a handsome, unoffending-looking youth of eighteen, followed him, gazing round upon the crowd with his mouth open, and looking very much annoyed at his part of the pageant. The young duke has a good figure, and is certainly a very beautiful dancer. His mouth is loose and weak, and his eyes are as opaque as agates. He wore the uniform of the Garde Nationale, which does not become him. In ordinary gentleman's dress, he is a very authentical copy of a Bond-street dandy, and looks as little like a Frenchman as most of Stultz's subjects. He danced all the evening, and selected, very popularly, decidedly the most vulgar women in the room, looking all the while as one who had been petted by the finest women in France (Leontine Fay among the number), might be supposed to look, under such an infliction. The king's second son, the Duke of Nemours, pursued the same policy. He has a brighter face than his brother, with hair almost white, and dances extremely well. The second daughter is also much prettier than the eldest. On the whole, the king's family is a very plain, though a very amiable one, and the people seem attached to them.

These general descriptions, are, after all, very vague. Here I have written half a sheet with a picture in my mind of which you are getting no semblable idea. Language is a mere skeleton of such things. The Academie Royale should be borne over the water like the chapel of Loretto, and set down in Broadway with all its lights, music, and people, to give you half a notion of the "Bal en faveur des Pauvres." And so it is with everything except the little histories of one's own personal atmosphere, and that is the reason why egotism should be held virtuous in a traveller, and the reason why one cannot study Europe at home.

After getting our American party places, I abandoned myself to the strongest current, and went in search of "lions." The first face that arrested my eye was that of the Duchess D'Istria, a woman celebrated here for her extraordinary personal beauty.

Directly opposite this lovely dutchess, in the other stage-box, sat Donna Maria, the young Queen of Portugal, surrounded by her relatives. The ex-empress, her mother, was on her right, her grandmother on her left, and behind her some half dozen of her Portuguese cousins. She is a little girl of twelve or fourteen, with a fat, heavy face, and a remarkably pampered, sleepy look. She was dressed like an old woman, and gaped incessantly the whole evening. The box was a perfect blaze of diamonds. I never before realized the beauty of these splendid stones. The necks, heads, arms, and waists of the ladies royal were all streaming with light. The necklace of the empress mother particularly flashed on the eye in every part of the house. By the unceasing exclamations of the women, it was an unusually brilliant show, even here. The little Donna has a fine, well-rounded chin; and when she smiled in return to the king's bow, I thought I could see more than a child's character in the expression of her mouth. I should think a year or two of mental uneasiness might let out a look of intelligence through her heavy features. She is likely to have it, I think, with the doubtful fortunes that seem to beset her.

I met Don Pedro often in society before his departure upon his expedition. He is a short, well-made man, of great personal accomplishment, and a very bad expression, rather aggravated by an unfortunate cutaneous eruption. The first time I saw him, I was induced to ask who he was, from the apparent coldness and dislike with which he was treated by a lady whose beauty had strongly arrested my attention. He sat by her on a sofa in a very crowded party, and seemed to be saying something very earnestly, which made the lady's Spanish eyes flash fire, and brought a curl of very positive anger upon a pair of the loveliest lips imaginable. She was a slender, aristocratic-looking creature, and dressed most magnificently. After glancing at them a minute or two, I made up my mind that, from the authenticity of his dress and appointments, he was an Englishman, and that she was some French lady of rank whom he was particularly annoying with his addresses. On inquiry, the gentleman proved to be Don Pedro, and the lady the Countess de Lourle, his sister! I have often met her since, and never without wondering how two of the same family could look so utterly unlike each other. The Count de Lourle is called the Adonis of Paris. He is certainly a very splendid fellow, and justifies the romantic admiration of his wife, who married him clandestinely, giving him her left hand in the ceremony, as is the etiquette, they say, when a princess marries below her rank. One can not help looking with great interest on a beautiful creature like this, who has broken away from the imposing fetters of a royal sphere, to follow the dictates of natural feeling. It does not occur so often in Europe that one may not sentimentalize about it without the charge of affectation.

To return to the ball. The king bowed himself out a little after midnight, and with him departed most of the fat people, and all the little girls. This made room enough to dance, and the French set themselves at it in good earnest. I wandered about for an hour or two; after wearying my imagination quite out in speculating on the characters and rank of people whom I never saw before and shall probably never see again, I mounted to the paradis to take a last look down upon the splendid scene, and made my exit. I should be quite content never to go to such a ball again, though it was by far the most splendid scene of the kind I ever saw.

LETTER XII.

PLACE LOUIS XV.—PANORAMIC VIEW OF PARIS—A LITERARY CLUB DINNER—THE GUESTS—THE PRESIDENT—THE EXILED POLES, ETC.

I have spent the day in a long stroll. The wind blew warm and delicious from the south this morning, and the temptation to abandon lessons and lectures was irresistible. Taking the Arc de l'Etoile as my extreme point I yielded to all the leisurely hinderances of shop-windows, beggars, book-stalls, and views by the way. Among the specimen-cards in an engraver's window I was amused at finding, in the latest Parisian fashion, "Hussein-Pacha, Dey d'Algiers."

These delightful Tuileries! We rambled through them (I had met a friend and countryman, and enticed him into my idle plans for the day), and amused ourselves with the never-failing beauty and grace of the French children for an hour. On the inner terrace we stopped to look at the beautiful hotel of Prince Polignac, facing the Tuileries, on the opposite bank. By the side of this exquisite little model of a palace stands the superb commencement of Napoleon's ministerial hotel, breathing of his glorious conception in every line of its ruins. It is astonishing what a godlike impress that man left upon all he touched.

Every third or fourth child in the gardens was dressed in the full uniform of the National Guard—helmet, sword, epaulets, and all. They are ludicrous little caricatures, of course, but it inoculates them with love of the corps, and it would be better if that were synonymous with a love of liberal principals. The Garde Nationale are supposed to be more than half "Carlists" at this moment.

We passed out by the guarded gate of the Tuileries to the Place Louis XV. This square is a most beautiful spot, as a centre of unequalled views, and yet a piece of earth so foully polluted with human blood probably does not exist on the face of the globe. It divides the Tuileries from the Champs Elysées, and ranges of course, in the long broad avenue of two miles, stretching between the king's palace and the Arc de l'Etoile. It is but a list of names to write down the particular objects to be seen in such a view, but it commands, at the extremities of its radii, the most princely edifices, seen hence with the most advantageous foregrounds of space and avenue, and softened by distance into the misty and unbroken surface of engraving. The king's palace is on one hand, Napoleon's Arch at a distance of nearly two miles on the other, Prince Talleyrand's regal dwelling behind, with the church of Madelaine seen through the Rue Royale, while before you, to the south, lies a picture of profuse splendor: the broad Seine, spanned by bridges that are the admiration of Europe, and crowded by specimens of architectural magnificence; the Chamber of Deputies; and the Palais Bourbon, approached by the Pont Louis XVI. with its gigantic statues and simple majesty of structure; and, rising over all, the grand dome of the "Invalides," which Napoleon gilded, to divert the minds of his subjects from his lost battle, and which Peter the Great admired more than all Paris beside. What a spot for a man to stand upon, with but one bosom to feel and one tongue to express his wonder!

And yet, of what, that should make a spot of earth sink to perdition, has it not been the theatre? Here were beheaded the unfortunate Louis XVI.—his wife, Marie Antoinette—his kinsman, Philip duke of Orleans, and his sister Elizabeth; and here were guillotined the intrepid Charlotte Corday, the deputy Brissot, and twenty of his colleagues, and all the victims of the revolution of 1793, to the amount of two thousand eight hundred; and here Robespierre and his cursed crew met at last with their insufficient retribution; and, as if it were destined to be the very blood-spot of the earth, here the fireworks, which were celebrating the marriage of the same Louis that was afterward brought hither to the scaffold, exploded, and killed fourteen hundred persons. It has been the scene, also, of several minor tragedies not worth mentioning in such a connexion. Were I a Bourbon, and as unpopular as King Philippe I. at this moment, the view of the Place Louis XV. from my palace windows would very much disturb the beauty of the perspective. Without an equivoque, I should look with a very ominous dissatisfaction on the "Elysian fields" that lie beyond.

We loitered slowly on to the Barrier Neuilly, just outside of which, and right before the city gates, stands the Triumphal Arch. It has the stamp of Napoleon—simple grandeur. The broad avenue from the Tuileries swells slowly up to it for two miles, and the view of Paris at its foot, even, is superb. We ascended to the unfinished roof, a hundred and thirty-five feet from the ground, and saw the whole of the mighty capital of France at a coup d'œil—churches, palaces, gardens; buildings heaped upon buildings clear over the edge of the horizon, where the spires of the city in which you stand are scarcely visible for the distance.

I dined, a short time since, with the editors of the Revue Encyclopedique at their monthly reunion. This is a sort of club dinner, to which the eminent contributors of the review invite once a month all the strangers of distinction who happen to be in Paris. I owed my invitation probably to the circumstance of my living with Dr. Howe, who is considered the organ of American principles here, and whose force of character has given him a degree of respect and prominence not often attained by foreigners. It was the most remarkable party, by far, that I had ever seen. There were nearly a hundred guests, twenty or thirty of whom were distinguished Poles, lately arrived from Warsaw. Generals Romarino and Langermann were placed beside the president, and another general, whose name is as difficult to remember as his face is to forget, and who is famous for having been the last on the field, sat next to the head seat. Near him were General Bernard and Dr. Bowring, with Sir Sidney Smith (covered with orders, from every quarter of the world), and the president of Colombia. After the usual courses of a French dinner, the president, Mons. Julien, a venerable man with snow-white hair, addressed the company. He expressed his pleasure at the meeting, with the usual courtesies of welcome, and in the fervent manner of the old school of French politeness; and then pausing a little, and lowering his voice, with a very touching cadence, he looked around to the Poles, and began to speak of their country. Every movement was instantly hushed about the table—the guests leaned forward, some of them half rising in their earnestness to hear; the old man's voice trembled, and sunk lower; the Poles dropped their heads upon their bosoms, and the whole company were strongly affected. His manner suddenly changed at this moment, in a degree that would have seemed too dramatic, if the strong excitement had not sustained him. He spoke indignantly of the Russian barbarity toward Poland—assured the exiles of the strong sympathy felt by the great mass of the French people in their cause, and expressed his confident belief that the struggle was not yet done, and the time was near when, with France at her back, Poland would rise and be free. He closed, amid tumultuous acclamation, and all the Poles near him kissed the old man, after the French manner, upon both his cheeks.

This speech was followed by several others, much to the same effect. Dr. Bowring replied handsomely, in French, to some compliment paid to his efforts on the "question of reform," in England. Cesar Moreau, the great schemist, and founder of the Academie d'Industrie, said a few very revolutionary things quite emphatically, rolling his fine visionary-looking eyes about as if he saw the "shadows cast before" of coming events; and then rose a speaker, whom I shall never forget. He was a young Polish noble, of about nineteen, whose extreme personal beauty and enthusiastic expression of countenance had particularly arrested my attention in the drawing-room, before dinner. His person was slender and graceful—his eye and mouth full of beauty and fire, and his manner had a quiet native superiority, that would have distinguished him anywhere. He had behaved very gallantly in the struggle, and some allusion had been made to him in one of the addresses. He rose modestly, and half unwillingly, and acknowledged the kind wishes for his country in language of great elegance. He then went on to speak of the misfortunes of Poland, and soon warmed into eloquence of the most vivid earnestness and power. I never was more moved by a speaker—he seemed perfectly unconscious of everything but the recollections of his subject. His eyes swam with tears and flashed with indignation alternately, and his refined, spirited mouth assumed a play of varied expression, which, could it have been arrested, would have made a sculptor immortal. I can hardly write extravagantly of him, for all present were as much excited as myself. One ceases to wonder at the desperate character of the attempt to redeem the liberty of a land when he sees such specimens of its people. I have seen hundreds of Poles, of all classes, in Paris, and I have not yet met with a face of even common dulness among them.

You have seen by the papers, I presume, that a body of several thousand Poles fled from Warsaw, after the defeat, and took refuge in the northern forests of Prussia. They gave up their arms under an assurance from the king that they should have all the rights of Prussian subjects. He found it politic afterward to recall his protection, and ordered them back to Poland. They refused to go, and were surrounded by a detachment of his army, and the orders given to fire upon them. The soldiers refused, and the Poles, taking advantage of the sympathy of the army, broke through the ranks, and escaped to the forest, where, at the last news, they were armed with clubs, and determined to defend themselves to the last. The consequence of a return to Poland would be, of course, an immediate exile to Siberia. The Polish committee, American and French, with General Lafayette at their head, have appropriated a great part of their funds to the relief of this body, and our countryman, Dr. Howe, has undertaken the dangerous and difficult task of carrying it to them. He left Paris for Brussels, with letters from the Polish generals, and advices from Lafayette to all Polish committees upon his route, that they should put all their funds into his hands. He is a gallant fellow, and will succeed if any one can; but he certainly runs great hazard. God prosper him!

LETTER XIII.

THE GAMBLING-HOUSES OF PARIS.

I accepted, last night, from a French gentleman of high standing, a polite offer of introduction to one of the exclusive gambling clubs of Paris. With the understanding, of course, that it was only as a spectator, my friend, whom I had met at a dinner party, despatched a note from the table, announcing to the temporary master of ceremonies his intention of presenting me. We went at eleven, in full dress. I was surprised at the entrance with the splendor of the establishment—gilt balustrades, marble staircases, crowds of servants in full livery, and all the formal announcement of a court. Passing through several ante-chambers, a heavy folding-door was thrown open, and we were received by one of the noblest-looking men I have seen in France—Count ——. I was put immediately at my ease by his dignified and kind politeness; and after a little conversation in English, which he spoke fluently, the entrance of some other person left me at liberty to observe at my leisure. Everything about me had the impress of the studied taste of high life. The lavish and yet soft disposition of light, the harmony of color in the rich hangings and furniture, the quiet manners and subdued tones of conversation, the respectful deference of the servants, and the simplicity of the slight entertainment, would have convinced me, without my Asmodeus, that I was in no every-day atmosphere. Conversation proceeded for an hour, while the members came dropping in from their evening engagements, and a little after twelve a glass door was thrown open, and we passed from the reception-room to the spacious suite of apartments intended for play. One or two of the gentlemen entered the side rooms for billiards and cards, but the majority closed about the table of hazard in the central hall. I had never conceived so beautiful an apartment. It can be described in two words—columns and mirrors. There was nothing else between the exquisitely-painted ceiling and the floor. The form was circular, and the wall was laid with glass, interrupted only with pairs of Corinthian pillars, with their rich capitals reflected and re-reflected innumerably. It seemed like a hall of colonnades of illimitable extent—the multiplication of the mirrors into each other was so endless and illusive. I felt an unconquerable disposition to abandon myself to a waking revery of pleasure; and as soon as the attention of the company was perfectly engrossed by the silent occupation before them, I sank upon a sofa, and gave my senses up for a while to the fascination of the scene. My eye was intoxicated. As far as my sight could penetrate, stretched apparently interminable halls, carpeted with crimson, and studded with graceful columns and groups of courtly figures, forming altogether, with its extent and beauty, and in the subdued and skilfully-managed light, a picture that, if real, would be one of unsurpassable splendor. I quite forgot my curiosity to see the game. I had merely observed, when my companion reminded me of the arrival of my own appointed hour for departure that, whatever was lost or won, the rustling bills were passed from one to the other with a quiet and imperturbable politeness, that betrayed no sign either of chagrin or triumph; though, from the fact that the transfers were in paper only, the stakes must have been anything but trifling. Refusing a polite invitation to partake of the supper, always in waiting, we took leave about two hours after midnight.

As we drove from the court, my companion suggested to me, that, since we were out at so late an hour, we might as well look in for a moment at the more accessible "hells," and, pulling the cordon, he ordered to "Frascati's." This, you know of course, is the fashionable place of ruin, and here the heroes of all novels, and the rakes of all comedies, mar or make their fortunes. An evening dress, and the look of a gentleman, are the only required passport. A servant in attendance took our hats and canes, and we walked in without ceremony. It was a different scene from the former. Four large rooms, plainly but handsomely furnished, opened into each other, three of which were devoted to play, and crowded with players. Elegantly-dressed women, some of them with high pretensions to French beauty, sat and stood at the table, watching their own stakes in the rapid games with fixed attention. The majority of the gentlemen were English. The table was very large, marked as usual with the lines and figures of the game, and each person playing had a small rake in his hand, with which he drew toward him his proportion of the winnings. I was disappointed at the first glance in the faces: there was very little of the high-bred courtesy I had seen at the club-house, but there was no very striking exhibition of feeling, and I should think, in any but an extreme case, the whispering silence and general quietness of the room would repress it. After watching the variations of luck awhile, however, I selected one or two pretty desperate losers, and a young Frenchman who was a large winner, and confined my observation to them only. Among the former was a girl of about eighteen, a mild, quiet-looking creature, with her hair curling long on her neck, and hands childishly small and white, who lost invariably. Two piles of five-franc pieces and a small heap of gold lay on the table beside her, and I watched her till she laid the last coin upon the losing color. She bore it very well. By the eagerness with which, at every turn of the last card, she closed her hand upon the rake which she held, it was evident that her hopes were high; but when her last piece was drawn into the bank, she threw up her little fingers with a playful desperation, and commenced conversation even gayly with a gentleman who stood leaning over her chair. The young Frenchman continued almost as invariably to win. He was excessively handsome; but there was a cold, profligate, unvarying hardness of expression in his face, that made me dislike him. The spectators drew gradually about his chair; and one or two of the women, who seemed to know him well, selected a color for him occasionally, or borrowed of him and staked for themselves. We left him winning. The other players were mostly English, and very uninteresting in their exhibition of disappointment. My companion told me that there would be more desperate playing toward morning, but I had become disgusted with the cold selfish faces of the scene, and felt no interest sufficient to detain me.

LETTER XIV.

THE GARDEN OF THE TUILERIES—PRINCE MOSCOWA—SONS OF NAPOLEON—COOPER AND MORSE—SIR SIDNEY SMITH—FASHIONABLE WOMEN—CLOSE OF THE DAY—THE FAMOUS EATING-HOUSES—HOW TO DINE WELL IN PARIS, ETC.

It is March, and the weather has all the characteristics of New-England May. The last two or three days have been deliciously spring-like, clear, sunny, and warm. The gardens of the Tuileries are crowded. The chairs beneath the terraces are filled by the old men reading the gazettes, mothers and nurses watching their children at play, and, at every few steps, circles of whole families sitting and sewing, or conversing, as unconcernedly as at home. It strikes a stranger oddly. With the privacy of American feelings, we cannot conceive of these out-of-door French habits. What would a Boston or New York mother think of taking chairs for her whole family, grown-up daughters and all, in the Mall or upon the Battery, and spending the day in the very midst of the gayest promenade of the city? People of all ranks do it here. You will see the powdered, elegant gentleman of the ancien régime, handing his wife or daughter to a straw-bottomed chair, with all the air of drawing-room courtesy; and, begging pardon for the liberty, pull his journal from his pocket, and sit down to read beside her; or a tottering old man, leaning upon a stout Swiss servant girl, goes bowing and apologizing through the crowd, in search of a pleasant neighbor, or some old compatriot, with whom he may sit and nod away the hours of sunshine. It is a beautiful custom, positively. The gardens are like a constant féte. It is a holiday revel, without design or disappointment. It is a masque, where every one plays his character unconsciously, and therefore naturally and well. We get no idea of it at home. We are too industrious a nation to have idlers enough. It would even pain most of the people of our country to see so many thousands of all ages and conditions of life spending day after day in such absolute uselessness.

Imagine yourself here, on the fashionable terrace, the promenade, two days in the week, of all that is distinguished and gay in Paris. It is a short raised walk, just inside the railings, and the only part of all these wide and beautiful gardens where a member of the beau monde is ever to be met. The hour is four, the day Friday, the weather heavenly. I have just been long enough in Paris to be an excellent walking dictionary, and I will tell you who people are. In the first place, all the well-dressed men you see are English. You will know the French by those flaring coats, laid clear back on their shoulders, and their execrable hats and thin legs. Their heads are fresh from the hair-dresser; their hats are chapeaux de soie or imitation beaver; they are delicately rouged, and wear very white gloves; and those who are with ladies, lead, as you observe, a small dog by a string, or carry it in their arms. No French lady walks out without her lap-dog. These slow-paced men you see in brown mustaches and frogged coats are refugee Poles. The short, thick, agile-looking man before us is General ——, celebrated for having been the last to surrender on the last field of that brief contest. His handsome face is full of resolution, and unlike the rest of his countrymen, he looks still unsubdued and in good heart. He walks here every day an hour or two, swinging his cane round his forefinger, and thinking, apparently of anything but his defeat. Observe these two young men approaching us. The short one on the left, with the stiff hair and red mustache, is Prince Moscowa, the son of Marshal Ney. He is an object of more than usual interest just now, as the youngest of the new batch of peers. The expression of his countenance is more bold than handsome, and indeed he is anything but a carpet knight; a fact of which he seems, like a man of sense, quite aware. He is to be seen at the parties standing with his arms folded, leaning silently against the wall for hours together. His companion is, I presume to say, quite the handsomest man you ever saw. A little over six feet, perfectly proportioned, dark silken-brown hair, slightly curling about his forehead, a soft curling mustache, and beard just darkening the finest cut mouth in the world, and an olive complexion, of the most golden richness and clearness—Mr. —— is called the handsomest man in Europe. What is more remarkable still, he looks like the most modest man in Europe, too; though, like most modest looking men, his reputation for constancy in the gallant world is somewhat slender. And here comes a fine-looking man, though of a different order of beauty—a natural son of Napoleon. He is about his father's height, and has most of his features, though his person and air must be quite different. You see there Napoleon's beautiful mouth and thinly chiselled nose, but I fancy that soft eye is his mother's. He is said to be one of the most fascinating men in France. His mother was the Countess Waleski, a lady with whom the Emperor became acquainted in Poland. It is singular that Napoleon's talents and love of glory have not descended upon any of the eight or ten sons whose claims to his paternity are admitted. And here come two of our countrymen, who are to be seen constantly together—Cooper and Morse. That is Cooper with the blue surtout buttoned up to his throat, and his hat over his eyes. What a contrast between the faces of the two men! Morse with his kind, open, gentle countenance, the very picture of goodness and sincerity; and Cooper, dark and corsair-looking, with his brows down over his eyes, and his strongly lined mouth fixed in an expression of moodiness and reserve. The two faces, however, are not equally just to their owners—Morse is all that he looks to be, but Cooper's features do him decided injustice. I take a pride in the reputation which this distinguished countryman of ours has for humanity and generous sympathy. The distress of the refugee liberals from all countries comes home especially to Americans, and the untiring liberality of Mr. Cooper particularly, is a fact of common admission and praise. It is pleasant to be able to say such things. Morse is taking a sketch of the Gallery of the Louvre, and he intends copying some of the best pictures also, to accompany it as an exhibition, when he returns. Our artists do our country credit abroad. The feeling of interest in one's country artists and authors becomes very strong in a foreign land. Every leaf of laurel awarded to them seems to touch one's own forehead. And, talking of laurels, here comes Sir Sidney Smith—the short, fat, old gentleman yonder, with the large aquiline nose and keen eye. He is one of the few men who ever opposed Napoleon successfully, and that should distinguish him, even if he had not won by his numerous merits and achievements the gift of almost every order in Europe. He is, among other things, of a very mechanical turn, and is quite crazy just now about a six-wheeled coach, which he has lately invented, and of which nobody sees the exact benefit but himself. An invitation to his rooms, to hear his description of the model, is considered the last new bore.

And now for ladies. Whom do you see that looks distinguished? Scarce one whom you would take positively for a lady, I venture to presume. These two, with the velvet pelisses and small satin bonnets, are rather the most genteel-looking people in the garden. I set them down for ladies of rank, in the first walk I ever took here; and two who have just passed us, with the curly lap-dog, I was equally sure were persons of not very dainty morality. It is precisely au contraire. The velvet pelisses are gamblers from Frascati's, and the two with the lap-dog are the Countess N. and her unmarried daughter—two of the most exclusive specimens of Parisian society. It is very odd—but if you see a remarkably modest-looking woman in Paris, you may be sure, as the periphrasis goes, that "she is no better than she should be." Everything gets travestied in this artificial society. The general ambition seems to be, to appear that which one is not. White-haired men cultivate their sparse mustaches, and dark-haired men shave. Deformed men are successful in gallantry, where handsome men despair. Ugly women dress and dance, while beauties mope and are deserted. Modesty looks brazen, and vice looks timid; and so all through the calendar. Life in Paris is as pretty a series of astonishment, as an ennuyé could desire.

But there goes the palace-bell—five o'clock! The sun is just disappearing behind the dome of the "Invalides," and the crowd begins to thin. Look at the atmosphere of the gardens. How deliciously the twilight mist softens everything. Statues, people, trees, and the long perspectives down the alleys, all mellowed into the shadowy indistinctness of fairy-land. The throng is pressing out at the gates, and the guard, with his bayonet presented, forbids all re-entrance, for the gardens are cleared at sundown. The carriages are driving up and dashing away, and if you stand a moment you will see the most vulgar-looking people you have met in your promenade, waited for by chasseurs, and departing with indications of rank in their equipages, which nature has very positively denied to their persons. And now all the world dines and dines well. The "chef" stands with his gold repeater in his hand, waiting for the moment to decide the fate of the first dish; the garçons at the restaurants have donned their white aprons, and laid the silver forks upon the napkins; the pretty women are seated on their thrones in the saloons, and the interesting hour is here. Where shall we dine? We will walk toward the Palais Royal, and talk of it as we go along.

That man would "deserve well of his country" who should write a "Paris Guide" for the palate. I would do it myself if I could elude the immortality it would occasion me. One is compelled to pioneer his own stomach through the endless cartes of some twelve eating-houses, all famous, before he half knows whether he is dining well or ill. I had eaten for a week at Very's, for instance, before I discovered that, since Pelham's day, that gentleman's reputation has gone down. He is a subject for history at present. I was misled also by an elderly gentleman at Havre, who advised me to eat at Grignon's, in the Passage Vivienne. Not liking my first coquilles aux huitres, I made some private inquiries, and found that his chef had deserted him about the time of Napoleon's return from Elba. A stranger gets misguided in this way. And then, if by accident you hit upon the right house, you may be eating for a month before you find out the peculiar triumphs which have stamped its celebrity. No mortal man can excel in everything, and it is as true of cooking as it is of poetry. The "Rochers de Cancale," is now the first eating-house in Paris, yet they only excel in fish. The "Trois Fréres Provençaux," have a high reputation, yet their cotelettes provençales are the only dish which you can not get equally well elsewhere. A good practice is to walk about in the Palais Royal for an hour before dinner, and select a master. You will know a gourmet easily—a man slightly past the prime of life, with a nose just getting its incipient blush, a remarkably loose, voluminous white cravat, and a corpulence more of suspicion than fact. Follow him to his restaurant, and give the garçon a private order to serve you with the same dishes as the bald gentleman. (I have observed that dainty livers universally lose their hair early.) I have been in the wake of such a person now for a week or more, and I never lived, comparatively, before. Here we are, however, at the "Trois Fréres," and there goes my unconscious model deliberately up stairs. We'll follow him, and double his orders, and if we dine not well, there is no eating in France.

LETTER XV.

HOPITAL DES INVALIDES—MONUMENT OF TURENNE—MARSHAL NEY—A POLISH LADY IN UNIFORM—FEMALES MASQUERADING IN MEN'S CLOTHES—DUEL BETWEEN THE SONS OF GEORGE IV. AND OF BONAPARTE—GAMBLING PROPENSITIES OF THE FRENCH.

The weather still holds warm and bright, as it has been all the month, and the scarcely "premature white pantaloons" appeared yesterday in the Tuileries. The ladies loosen their "boas;" the silken greyhounds of Italy follow their mistresses without shivering; the birds are noisy and gay in the clipped trees—who that had known February in New England would recognize him by such a description?

I took an indolent stroll with a friend this morning to the Hopital des Invalides, on the other side of the river. Here, not long since, were twenty-five thousand old soldiers. There are but five thousand now remaining, most of them having been dismissed by the Bourbons. It is of course one of the most interesting spots in France; and of a pleasant day there is no lounge where a traveller can find so much matter for thought, with so much pleasure to the eye. We crossed over by the Pons Louis Quinze, and kept along the bank of the river to the esplanade in front of the hospital. There was never a softer sunshine, or a more deliciously-tempered air; and we found the old veterans out of doors, sitting upon the cannon along the rampart, or halting about, with their wooden legs, under the trees, the pictures of comfort and contentment. The building itself, as you know, is very celebrated for its grandeur. The dome of the Invalides rises upon the eye from all parts of Paris, a perfect model of proportion and beauty. It was this which Bonaparte ordered to be gilded, to divert the people from thinking too much upon his defeat. It is a living monument of the most touching recollections of him now. Positively the blood mounts, and the tears spring to the eyes of the spectator, as he stands a moment, and remembers what is around him in that place. To see his maimed followers, creeping along the corridors, clothed and fed by the bounty he left, in a place devoted to his soldiers alone, their old comrades about them, and all glowing with one feeling of devotion to his memory, to speak to them, to hear their stories of—"L'Empereur" it is better than a thousand histories to make one feel the glory of "the great captain." The interior of the dome is vast, and of a splendid style of architecture, and out from one of its sides extends a superb chapel, hung all round with the tattered flags taken in his victories alone. Here the veterans of his army worship, beneath the banners for which they fought. It is hardly appropriate, I should think, to adorn thus the church of a "religion of peace;" but while there, at least, we feel strangely certain, somehow, that it is right and fitting; and when, as we stood deciphering the half-effaced insignia of the different nations, the organ began to peal, there certainly was anything but a jar between this grand music, consecrated as it is by religious associations, and the thrilling and uncontrolled sense in my bosom of Napoleon's glory. The anthem seemed to him!

The majestic sounds were still rolling through the dome when we came to the monument of Turenne. Here is another comment on the character of Bonaparte's mind. There was once a long inscription on this monument, describing, in the fulsome style of an epitaph, the deeds and virtues of the distinguished man who is buried beneath. The emperor removed and replaced it by a small slab, graven with the single word Turenne. You acknowledge the sublimity of this as you stand before it. Everything is in keeping with its grandeur. The lofty proportions and magnificence of the dome, the tangible trophies of glory, and the maimed and venerable figures, kneeling about the altar, of those who helped to win them, are circumstances that make that eloquent word as articulate as if it were spoken in thunder. You feel that Napoleon's spirit might walk the place, and read the hearts of those who should visit it, unoffended.

We passed on to the library. It is ornamented with the portraits of all the generals of Napoleon, save one. Ney's is not there. It should, and will be, at some time or other, doubtless; but I wonder that, in a day when such universal justice is done to the memory of this brave man, so obvious and it would seem necessary a reparation should not be demanded. Great efforts have been making of late to get his sentence publicly reversed, but, though they deny his widow and children nothing else, this melancholy and unavailing satisfaction is refused them. Ney's memory little needs it, it is true. No visiter looks about the gallery at the Invalides without commenting feelingly on the omission of his portrait; and probably no one of the scarred veterans who sit there, reading their own deeds in history, looks round on the faces of the old leaders of whom it tells, without remembering and feeling that the brightest name upon the page is wanting. I would rather, if I were his son, have the regret than the justice.

We left the hospital, as all must leave it, full of Napoleon. France is full of him. The monuments and the hearts of the people, all are alive with his name and glory. Disapprove and detract from his reputation as you will (and as powerful minds, with apparent justice, have done), as long as human nature is what it is, as long as power and loftiness of heart hold their present empire over the imagination, Napoleon is immortal.

The promenading world is amused just now with the daily appearance in the Tuileries of a Polish lady, dressed in the Polonaise undress uniform, decorated with the order of distinction given for bravery at Warsaw. She is not very beautiful, but she wears the handsome military cap quite gallantly; and her small feet and full chest are truly captivating in boots and a frogged coat. It is an exceedingly spirited, well-charactered face, with a complexion slightly roughened by her new habits. Her hair is cut short, and brushed up at the sides, and she certainly handles the little switch she carries with an air which entirely forbids insult. She is ordinarily seen lounging very idly along between two polytechnic boys, who seem to have a great admiration for her. I observe that the Polish generals touch their hats very respectfully as she passes, but as yet I have been unable to come at her precise history.

By the by, masquerading in men's clothes is not at all uncommon in Paris. I have sometimes seen two or three women at a time dining at the restaurants in this way. No notice is taken of it, and the lady is perfectly safe from insult, though every one that passes may penetrate the disguise. It is common at the theatres, and at the public balls still more so. I have noticed repeatedly at the weekly soirées of a lady of high respectability, two sisters in boy's clothes, who play duets upon the piano for the dance. The lady of the house told me they preferred it, to avoid attention, and the awkwardness of position natural to their vocation, in society. The tailors tell me it is quite a branch of trade—making suits for ladies of a similar taste. There is one particularly, in the Rue Richelieu, who is famed for his nice fits to the female figure. It is remarkable, however, that instead of wearing their new honors meekly, there is no such impertinent puppy as a femme deguisée. I saw one in a café, not long ago, rap the garçon very smartly over the fingers with a rattan, for overrunning her cup; and they are sure to shoulder you off the sidewalk, if you are at all in the way. I have seen several amusing instances of a probable quarrel in the street, ending in a gay bow, and a "pardon, madame!"

There has been a great deal of excitement here for the past two days on the result of a gambling quarrel. An English gentleman, a fine, gay, noble-looking fellow, whom I have often met at parties, and admired for his strikingly winning and elegant manners, lost fifty thousand francs on Thursday night at cards. The Count St. Leon was the winner. It appears that Hesse, the Englishman, had drank freely before sitting down to play, and the next morning his friend, who had bet upon the game, persuaded him that there had been some unfairness on the part of his opponent. He refused consequently to pay the debt, and charged the Frenchman, and another gentleman who backed him, with deception. The result was a couple of challenges, which were both accepted. Hesse fought the Count on Friday, and was dangerously wounded at the first fire. His friend fought on Saturday (yesterday), and is reported to be mortally wounded. It is a little remarkable that both the losers are shot, and still more remarkable, that Hesse should have been, as he was known to be, a natural son of George the Fourth; and Count Leon, as was equally well known, a natural son of Bonaparte!

Everybody gambles in Paris. I had no idea that so desperate a vice could be so universal, and so little deprecated as it is. The gambling-houses are as open and as ordinary a resort as any public promenade, and one may haunt them with as little danger to his reputation. To dine from six to eight, gamble from eight to ten, go to a ball, and return to gamble till morning, is as common a routine for married men and bachelors both, as a system of dress, and as little commented on. I sometimes stroll into the card-room at a party, but I can not get accustomed to the sight of ladies losing or winning money. Almost all Frenchwomen, who are too old to dance, play at parties; and their daughters and husbands watch the game as unconcernedly as if they were turning over prints. I have seen English ladies play, but with less philosophy. They do not lose their money gayly. It is a great spoiler of beauty, the vexation of a loss. I think I never could respect a woman upon whose face I had remarked the shade I often see at an English card-table. It is certain that vice walks abroad in Paris, in many a shape that would seem, to an American eye, to show the fiend too openly. I am not over particular, I think, but I would as soon expose a child to the plague as give either son or daughter a free rein for a year in Paris.

LETTER XVI.

THE CHOLERA—A MASQUE BALL—THE GAY WORLD—MOBS—VISIT TO THE HOTEL DIEU.

You see by the papers, I presume, the official accounts of the cholera in Paris. It seems very terrible to you, no doubt, at your distance from the scene, and truly it is terrible enough, if one could realize it, anywhere; but many here do not trouble themselves about it, and you might be in this metropolis a month, and if you observed the people only, and frequented only the places of amusement, and the public promenades, you might never suspect its existence. The weather is June-like, deliciously warm and bright; the trees are just in the tender green of the new buds, and the public gardens are thronged all day with thousands of the gay and idle, sitting under the trees in groups, laughing and amusing themselves, as if there were no plague in the air, though hundreds die every day. The churches are all hung in black; there is a constant succession of funerals; and you cross the biers and hand-barrows of the sick, hurrying to the hospitals at every turn, in every quarter of the city. It is very hard to realize such things, and, it would seem, very hard even to treat them seriously. I was at a masque ball at the Théatre des Varietés, a night or two since, at the celebration of the Mi-Careme, or half-Lent. There were some two thousand people, I should think, in fancy dresses, most of them grotesque and satirical, and the ball was kept up till seven in the morning, with all the extravagant gaiety, noise, and fun, with which the French people manage such matters. There was a cholera-waltz, and a cholera-galopade, and one man, immensely tall, dressed as a personification of the Cholera itself, with skeleton armor, bloodshot eyes, and other horrible appurtenances of a walking pestilence. It was the burden of all the jokes, and all the cries of the hawkers, and all the conversation; and yet, probably, nineteen out of twenty of those present lived in the quarters most ravaged by the disease, and many of them had seen it face to face, and knew perfectly its deadly character!

As yet, with few exceptions, the higher classes of society have escaped. It seems to depend very much on the manner in which people live, and the poor have been struck in every quarter, often at the very next door to luxury. A friend told me this morning, that the porter of a large and fashionable hotel, in which he lives, had been taken to the hospital; and there have been one or two cases in the airy quarter of St. Germain, in the same street with Mr. Cooper, and nearly opposite. Several physicians and medical students have died too, but the majority of these live with the narrowest economy, and in the parts of the city the most liable to impure effluvia. The balls go on still in the gay world; and I presume they would go on if there were only musicians enough left to make an orchestra, or fashionists to compose a quadrille. I was walking home very late from a party the night before last, with a captain in the English army. The gray of the morning was just stealing into the sky; and after a stopping a moment in the Place Vendome, to look at the column, stretching up apparently unto the very stars, we bade good morning, and parted. He had hardly left me, he said, when he heard a frightful scream from one of the houses in the Rue St. Honoré, and thinking there might be some violence going on, he rang at the gate and entered, mounting the first staircase that presented. A woman had just opened a door, and fallen on the broad stair at the top, and was writhing in great agony. The people of the house collected immediately; but the moment my friend pronounced the word cholera, there was a general dispersion, and he was left alone with the patient. He took her in his arms, and carried her to a coach-stand, without assistance, and, driving to the Hotel Dieu, left her with the Sœurs de Charité. She has since died.

As if one plague were not enough, the city is still alive in the distant faubourgs with revolts. Last night, the rappel was beat all over the town, the national guard called to arms, and marched to the Porte St. Denis, and the different quarters where the mobs were collected.

Many suppose there is no cholera except such as is produced by poison; and the Hotel Dieu, and the other hospitals, are besieged daily by the infuriated mob, who swear vengeance against the government for all the mortality they witness.

I have just returned from a visit to the Hotel Dieu—the hospital for the cholera. Impelled by a powerful motive, which it is not now necessary to explain, I had previously made several attempts to gain admission in vain; but yesterday I fell in fortunately with an English physician, who told me I could pass with a doctor's diploma, which he offered to borrow for me of some medical friend. He called by appointment at seven this morning, to accompany me on my visit.

It was like one of our loveliest mornings in June—an inspiriting, sunny, balmy day, all softness and beauty—and we crossed the Tuileries by one of its superb avenues, and kept down the bank of the river to the island. With the errand on which we were bound in our minds, it was impossible not to be struck very forcibly with our own exquisite enjoyment of life. I am sure I never felt my veins fuller of the pleasure of health and motion; and I never saw a day when everything about me seemed better worth living for. The splendid palace of the Louvre, with its long façade of nearly half a mile, lay in the mellowest sunshine on our left; the lively river, covered with boats, and spanned with its magnificent and crowded bridges on our right; the view of the island, with its massive old structures below, and the fine gray towers of the church of Notre Dame rising, dark and gloomy, in the distance, rendered it difficult to realize anything but life and pleasure. That under those very towers, which added so much to the beauty of the scene, there lay a thousand and more of poor wretches dying of a plague, was a thought my mind would not retain a moment.

Half an hour's walk brought us to the Place Notre Dame, on one side of which, next this celebrated church, stands the hospital. My friend entered, leaving me to wait till he had found an acquaintance of whom he could borrow a diploma. A hearse was standing at the door of the church, and I went in for a moment. A few mourners, with the appearance of extreme poverty, were kneeling round a coffin at one of the side altars; and a solitary priest, with an attendant boy, was mumbling the prayers for the dead. As I came out, another hearse drove up, with a rough coffin, scantily covered with a pall, and followed by one poor old man. They hurried in, and I strolled around the square. Fifteen or twenty water-carriers were filling their buckets at the fountain opposite, singing and laughing; and at the same moment four different litters crossed toward the hospital, each with its two or three followers, women and children, friends or relatives of the sick, accompanying them to the door, where they parted from them, most probably for ever. The litters were set down a moment before ascending the steps; the crowd pressed around and lifted the coarse curtains; farewells were exchanged, and the sick alone passed in. I did not see any great demonstration of feeling in the particular cases that were before me; but I can conceive, in the almost deadly certainty of this disease, that these hasty partings at the door of the hospital might often be scenes of unsurpassed suffering and distress.

I waited, perhaps, ten minutes more. In the whole time that I had been there, twelve litters, bearing the sick, had entered the Hotel Dieu. As I exhibited the borrowed diploma, the thirteenth arrived, and with it a young man, whose violent and uncontrolled grief worked so far on the soldier at the door, that he allowed him to pass. I followed the bearers to the yard, interested exceedingly to observe the first treatment and manner of reception. They wound slowly up the stone staircase to the upper story, and entered the female department—a long low room, containing nearly a hundred beds, placed in alleys scarce two feet from each other. Nearly all were occupied, and those which were empty my friend told me were vacated by deaths yesterday. They set down the litter by the side of a narrow cot, with coarse but clean sheets, and a Sœur de Charité, with a white cap, and a cross at her girdle, came and took off the canopy. A young woman, of apparently twenty-five, was beneath, absolutely convulsed with agony. Her eyes were started from their sockets, her mouth foamed, and her face was of a frightful, livid purple. I never saw so horrible a sight. She had been taken in perfect health only three hours before, but her features looked to me marked with a year of pain. The first attempt to lift her produced violent vomiting, and I thought she must die instantly. They covered her up in bed, and leaving the man who came with her hanging over her with the moan of one deprived of his senses, they went to receive others, who were entering in the same manner. I inquired of my companion how soon she would be attended to. He said, "possibly in an hour, as the physician was just commencing his rounds." An hour after this I passed the bed of this poor woman, and she had not yet been visited. Her husband answered my question with a choking voice and a flood of tears.

I passed down the ward, and found nineteen or twenty in the last agonies of death. They lay perfectly still, and seemed benumbed. I felt the limbs of several, and found them quite cold. The stomach only had a little warmth. Now and then a half groan escaped those who seemed the strongest; but with the exception of the universally open mouth and upturned ghastly eye, there were no signs of much suffering. I found two who must have been dead half an hour, undiscovered by the attendants. One of them was an old woman, nearly gray, with a very bad expression of face, who was perfectly cold—lips, limbs, body, and all. The other was younger, and looked as if she had died in pain. Her eyes appeared as if they had been forced half out of the sockets, and her skin was of the most livid and deathly purple. The woman in the next bed told me she had died since the Sœur de Charité had been there. It is horrible to think how these poor creatures may suffer in the very midst of the provisions that are made professedly for their relief. I asked why a simple prescription of treatment might not be drawn up the physicians, and administered by the numerous medical students who were in Paris, that as few as possible might suffer from delay. "Because," said my companion, "the chief physicians must do everything personally, to study the complaint." And so, I verily believe, more human lives are sacrificed in waiting for experiments, than ever will be saved by the results. My blood boiled from the beginning to the end of this melancholy visit.

I wandered about alone among the beds till my heart was sick, and I could bear it no longer; and then rejoined my friend, who was in the train of one of the physicians, making the rounds. One would think a dying person should be treated with kindness. I never saw a rougher or more heartless manner than that of the celebrated Dr. ——, at the bedsides of these poor creatures. A harsh question, a rude pulling open of the mouth, to look at the tongue, a sentence or two of unsuppressed comments to the students on the progress of the disease, and the train passed on. If discouragement and despair are not medicines, I should think the visits of such physicians were of little avail. The wretched sufferers turned away their heads after he had gone, in every instance that I saw, with an expression of visibly increased distress. Several of them refused to answer his questions altogether.

On reaching the bottom of the Salle St. Monique, one of the male wards, I heard loud voices and laughter. I had noticed much more groaning and complaining in passing among the men, and the horrible discordance struck me as something infernal. It proceeded from one of the sides to which the patients had been removed who were recovering. The most successful treatment has been found to be punch, very strong, with but little acid, and being permitted to drink as much as they would, they had become partially intoxicated. It was a fiendish sight, positively. They were sitting up, and reaching from one bed to the other, and with their still pallid faces and blue lips, and the hospital dress of white, they looked like so many carousing corpses. I turned away from them in horror.

I was stopped in the door-way by a litter entering with a sick woman. They set her down in the main passage between the beds, and left her a moment to find a place for her. She seemed to have an interval of pain, and rose up on one hand, and looked about her very earnestly. I followed the direction of her eyes, and could easily imagine her sensations. Twenty or thirty death-like faces were turned toward her from the different beds, and the groans of the dying and the distressed came from every side. She was without a friend whom she knew, sick of a mortal disease, and abandoned to the mercy of those whose kindness is mercenary and habitual, and of course without sympathy or feeling. Was it not enough alone, if she had been far less ill, to imbitter the very fountains of life, and kill her with mere fright and horror? She sank down upon the litter again, and drew her shawl over her head. I had seen enough of suffering, and I left the place.

On reaching the lower staircase, my friend proposed to me to look into the dead-room. We descended to a large dark apartment below the street-level, lighted by a lamp fixed to the wall. Sixty or seventy bodies lay on the floor, some of them quite uncovered, and some wrapped in mats. I could not see distinctly enough by the dim light, to judge of their discoloration. They appeared mostly old and emaciated.

I can not describe the sensation of relief with which I breathed the free air once more. I had no fear of the cholera, but the suffering and misery I had seen, oppressed and half smothered me. Every one who has walked through an hospital, will remember how natural it is to subdue the breath, and close the nostrils to the smells of medicine and the close air. The fact, too, that the question of contagion is still disputed, though I fully believe the cholera not to be contagious, might have had some effect. My breast heaved, however, as if a weight had risen from my lungs, and I walked home, blessing God for health, with undissembled gratitude.

P. S.—I began this account of my visit to the Hotel Dieu yesterday. As I am perfectly well this morning, I think the point of non-contagion, in my own case at least, is clear. I breathed the same air with the dying and the diseased for two hours, and felt of nearly a hundred to be satisfied of the curious phenomena of the vital heat. Perhaps an experiment of this sort in a man not professionally a physician, may be considered rash or useless; and I would not willingly be thought to have done it from any puerile curiosity. I have been interested in such subjects always; and I considered the fact that the king's sons had been permitted to visit the hospital, a sufficient assurance that the physicians were seriously convinced there could be no possible danger. If I need an apology, it may be found in this.

LETTER XVII.

LEGION OF HONOR—PRESENTATION TO THE KING—THE THRONE OF FRANCE—THE QUEEN AND THE PRINCESSES—COUNTESS GUICCIOLI—THE LATE DUEL—THE SEASON OF CARNIVAL—ANOTHER FANCY BALL—DIFFERENCE BETWEEN PRIVATE AND PUBLIC MASKERS—STREET MASKING—BALL AT THE PALACE—THE YOUNG DUKE OF ORLEANS—PRINCESS CHRISTINE—LORD HARRY VANE—HEIR OF CARDINAL RICHELIEU—VILLIERS—BERNARD, FABVIER, COUSIN, AND OTHER DISTINGUISHED CHARACTERS—THE SUPPER—THE GLASS VERANDAH, ETC.

As I was getting out of a fiacre this morning on the Boulevard, I observed that the driver had the cross of the legion of honor, worn very modestly under his coat. On taking a second look at his face, I was struck with its soldier-like, honest expression; and with the fear that I might imply a doubt by a question, I simply observed, that he probably received it from Napoleon. He drew himself up a little as he assented, and with half a smile pulled the coarse cape of his coat across his bosom. It was done evidently with a mixed feeling of pride and a dislike of ostentation, which showed the nurture of Napoleon. It is astonishing how superior every being seems to have become that served under him. Wherever you find an old soldier of the "emperor," as they delight to call him, you find a noble, brave, unpretending man. On mentioning this circumstance to a friend, he informed me, that it was possibly a man who was well known, from rather a tragical circumstance. He had driven a gentleman to a party one night, who was dissatisfied with him, for some reason or other, and abused him very grossly. The cocher the next morning sent him a challenge; and, as the cross of honor levels all distinctions, he was compelled to fight him, and was shot dead at the first fire.

Honors of this sort must be a very great incentive. They are worn very proudly in France. You see men of all classes, with the striped riband in their button-hole, marking them as the heroes of the three days of July. The Poles and the French and English, who fought well at Warsaw, wear also a badge; and it certainly produces a feeling of respect as one passes them in the street. There are several very young men, lads really, who are wandering about Paris, with the latter distinction on their breasts, and every indication that it is all they have brought away from their unhappy country. The Poles are coming in now from every quarter. I meet occasionally in society the celebrated Polish countess, who lost her property and was compelled to flee, for her devotion to the cause. Louis Philippe has formed a regiment of the refugees, and sent them to Algiers. He allows no liberalists to remain in Paris, if he can help it. The Spaniards and Italians, particularly, are ordered off to Tours, and other provincial towns, the instant they become pensioners upon the government.

I was presented last night, with Mr. Carr and Mr. Ritchie, two of our countrymen, to the king. We were very naturally prepared for an embarrassing ceremony—an expectation which was not lessened, in my case, by the necessity of a laced coat, breeches, and sword. We drove into the court of the Tuileries, as the palace clock struck nine, in the costume of courtiers of the time of Louis the Twelfth, very anxious about the tenacity of our knee-buckles, and not at all satisfied as to the justice done to our unaccustomed proportions by the tailor. To say nothing of my looks, I am sure I should have felt much more like a gentleman in my costume bourgeois. By the time we had been passed through the hands of all the chamberlains, however, and walked through all the preparatory halls and drawing-rooms, each with its complement of gentlemen in waiting, dressed like ourselves in lace and small-clothes, I became more reconciled to myself, and began to feel that I might possibly have looked out of place in my ordinary dress. The atmosphere of a court is very contagious in this particular.

After being sufficiently astonished with long rooms, frescoes, and guardsmen apparently seven or eight feet high, (the tallest men I ever saw, standing with halberds at the doors), we were introduced into the Salle du Tróne—a large hall lined with crimson velvet throughout, with the throne in the centre of one of the sides. Some half dozen gentlemen were standing about the fire, conversing very familiarly, among whom was the British ambassador, Lord Grenville, and the Brazilian minister, both of whom I had met before. The king was not there. The Swedish minister, a noble-looking man, with snow-white hair, was the only other official person present, each of the ministers having come to present one or two of his countrymen. The king entered in a few moments, in the simple uniform of the line, and joined the group at the fire, with the most familiar and cordial politeness; each minister presenting his countrymen as occasion offered, certainly with far less ceremony than one sees at most dinner-parties in America. After talking a few minutes with Lord Grenville, inquiring the progress of the cholera, he turned to Mr. Rives, and we were presented. We stood in a little circle round him, and he conversed with us about America for ten or fifteen minutes. He inquired from what States we came, and said he had been as far west as Nashville, Tennessee, and had often slept in the woods, quite as soundly as he ever did in more luxurious quarters. He begged pardon of Mr. Carr, who was from South Carolina, for saying that he had found the southern taverns not particularly good. He preferred the north. All this time I was looking out for some accent in the "king's English." He speaks the language with all the careless correctness and fluency of a vernacular tongue. We were all surprised at it. It is American English, however. He has not a particle of the cockney drawl, half Irish and half Scotch, with which many Englishmen speak. He must be the most cosmopolite king that ever reigned. He even said he had been at Tangiers, the place of Mr. Carr's consulate. After some pleasant compliments to our country, he passed to the Brazilian minister, who stood on the other side, leaving us delighted with his manner; and, probably, in spite of our independence, much more inclined than before to look indulgently upon his politics. The queen had entered, meantime, with the king's sister, Lady Adelaide, and one or two of the ladies of honor; and, after saying something courteous to all, in her own language, and assuring us that his majesty was very fond of America, the royal group bowed out, and left us once more to ourselves.

We remained a few minutes, and I occupied myself with looking at the gold and crimson throne before me, and recalling to my mind the world of historical circumstances connected with it. You can easily imagine it all. The throne of France is, perhaps, the most interesting one in the world. But, of all its associations, none rushed upon me so forcibly, or retained my imagination so long, as the accidental drama of which it was the scene during the three days of July. It was here that the people brought the polytechnic scholar, mortally wounded in the attack on the palace, to die. He breathed his last on the throne of France, surrounded with his comrades and a crowd of patriots. It is one of the most striking and affecting incidents, I think, in all history.

As we passed out I caught a glimpse, through a side door, of the queen and the princesses sitting round a table covered with books, in a small drawing-room, while a servant, in the gaudy livery of the court, was just entering with tea. The careless attitudes of the figures, the mellow light of the shade-lamp, and the happy voices of children coming through the door, reminded me more of home than anything I have seen in France. It is odd, but really the most aching sense of home-sickness I have felt since I left America, was awakened at that moment—in the palace of a king, and at the sight of his queen and daughters!

We stopped in the antechamber to have our names recorded in the visiting-book—a ceremony which insures us invitations to all the balls given at court during the winter. The first has already appeared in the shape of a printed note, in which we are informed by the "aide-de-camp of the king and the lady of honor of the queen," that we are invited to a ball at the palace on Monday night. To my distress there is a little direction at the bottom, "Les hommes seront en uniforme," which subjects those of us who are not military, once more to the awkwardness of this ridiculous court dress. I advise all Americans coming abroad to get a commission in the militia to travel with. It is of use in more ways than one.

I met the Countess Guiccioli, walking yesterday in the Tuileries. She looks much younger than I anticipated, and is a handsome blonde, apparently about thirty. I am told by a gentleman who knows her, that she has become a great flirt, and is quite spoiled by admiration. The celebrity of Lord Byron's attachment would, certainly, make her a very desirable acquaintance, were she much less pretty than she really is; and I am told her drawing-room is thronged with lovers of all nations, contending for a preference, which, having been once given, as it has, should be buried, I think, for ever. So, indeed, should have been the Empress Maria Louisa's, and that of the widow of Bishop Heber; and yet the latter has married a Greek count, and the former a German baron!

I find I was incorrect in the statement I gave you of the duel between Mr. Hesse and Count Leon. The particulars have come out more fully, and from the curious position of the parties (Mr. Hesse, as I stated, being the natural son of George the Fourth, and Count Leon of Napoleon) are worth recapitulating. Count Leon had lost several thousand francs to Mr. Hesse, which he refused to pay, alleging that there had been unfair dealing in the game. The matter was left to arbitration, and Mr. Hesse fully cleared of the charge. Leon still refused to pay, and for fifteen days practised with the pistol from morning till night. At the end of this time he paid the money, and challenged Hesse. The latter had lost the use of his right arm in the battle of Waterloo, (fighting of course against Count Leon's father), but accepted his challenge, and fired with his left hand. Hesse was shot through the body, and has since died, and Count Leon was not hurt. The affair has made a great sensation here, for Hesse had a young and lovely wife, only seventeen, and was unusually beloved and admired; while his opponent is a notorious gambler, and every way detested. People meet at the gaming-table here, however, as they meet in the street, without question of character.

Carnival is over. Yesterday was "Mardi Gras"—the last day of the reign of Folly. Paris has been like a city of grown-up children for a week. What with masking all night, supping, or breakfasting, (which you please), at sunrise, and going to bed between morning and noon, I feel that I have done my devoir upon the experiment of French manners.

It would be tedious, not to say improper, to describe all the absurdities I have seen and mingled in for the last fortnight; but I must try to give you some idea of the meaning the French attach to the season of carnival, and the manner in which it is celebrated.

In society it is the time for universal gaiety and freedom. Parties, fancy balls, and private masques, are given, and kept up till morning. The etiquette is something more free, and gallantry is indulged and followed with the privileges, almost, of a Saturnalia. One of the gayest things I have seen was a fancy ball, given by a man of some fashion, in the beginning of the season. Most of the distingués of Paris were there; and it was, perhaps, as fair a specimen of the elegant gaiety of the French capital, as occurred during the carnival. The rooms were full by ten. Everybody was in costume, and the ladies in dresses of unusual and costly splendor. At a bal costumé there are no masks, of course, and dancing, waltzing, and galopading followed each other in the ordinary succession, but with all the heightened effect and additional spirit of a magnificent spectacle. It was really beautiful. There were officers from all the English regiments, in their fine showy uniforms; and French officers who had brought dresses from their far-off campaigns; Turks, Egyptians, Mussulmans, and Algerine rovers—every country that had been touched by French soldiers, represented in its richest costume and by men of the finest appearance. There was a colonel of the English Madras cavalry, in the uniform of his corps—one mass of blue and silver, the most splendidly dressed man I ever saw; and another Englishman, who is said to be the successor of Lord Byron in the graces of the gay and lovely Countess Guiccioli, was dressed as a Greek; and between the exquisite taste and richness of his costume, and his really excessive personal beauty, he made no ordinary sensation. The loveliest woman there was a young baroness, whose dancing, figure, and face, so resembled a celebrated Philadelphia belle, that I was constantly expecting her musical French voice to break into English. She was dressed as an eastern dancing-girl, and floated about with the lightness and grace of a fairy. Her motion intoxicated the eye completely. I have seen her since at the Tuileries, where, in a waltz with the handsome Duke of Orleans, she was the single object of admiration for the whole court. She is a small, lightly-framed creature, with very little feet, and a face of more brilliancy than regular beauty, but all airiness and spirit. A very lovely, indolent-looking English girl, with large sleepy eyes, was dressed as a Circassian slave, with chains from her ankles to her waist. She was a beautiful part of the spectacle, but too passive to interest one. There were sylphs and nuns, broom-girls and Italian peasants, and a great many in rich Polonaise dresses. It was unlike any other fancy ball I ever saw, in the variety and novelty of the characters represented, and the costliness with which they were dressed. You can have no idea of the splendor of a waltz in such a glittering assemblage. It was about time for an early breakfast when the ball was over.

The private masks are amusing to those who are intimate with the circle. A stranger, of course, is neither acquainted enough to amuse himself within proper limits, nor incognito enough to play his gallantries at hazard. I never have seen more decidedly triste assemblies than the balls of this kind which I have attended, where the uniform black masks and dominoes gave the party the aspect of a funeral, and the restraint made it quite as melancholy.

The public masks are quite another affair. They are given at the principal theatres, and commence at midnight. The pit and stage are thrown into a brilliant hall, with the orchestra in the centre; the music is divine, and the etiquette perfect liberty. There is, of course, a great deal of vulgar company, for every one is admitted who pays the ten francs at the door; but all classes of people mingle in the crowd; and if one is not amused, it is because he will neither listen nor talk. I think it requires one or two masks to get one's eye so much accustomed to the sight, that he is not disgusted with the exteriors of the women. There was something very diabolical to me at first in a dead, black representation of the human face, and the long black domino. Persuading one's self that there is beauty under such an outside, is like getting up a passion for a very ugly woman, for the sake of her mind—difficult, rather. I soon became used to it, however, and amused myself infinitely. One is liable to waste his wit, to be sure; for in a crowd so rarely bien composée, as they phrase it, the undistinguishing dress gives every one the opportunity of bewildering you; but the feet and manner of walking, and the tone and mode of expression, are indices sufficiently certain to decide, and give interest to a pursuit; and, with tolerable caution, one is paid for his trouble, in nineteen cases out of twenty.

At the public masks, the visitors are not all in domino. One half at least are in caricature dresses, men in petticoats, and women in boots and spurs. It is not always easy to detect the sex. An English lady, a carnival-acquaintance of mine, made love successfully, with the aid of a tall figure and great spirit, to a number of her own sex. She wore a half uniform, and was certainly a very elegant fellow. France is so remarkable indeed, for effeminate-looking men and masculine-looking women, that half the population might change costume to apparent advantage. The French are fond of caricaturing English dandies, and they do it with great success. The imitation of Bond-street dialect in another language is highly amusing. There were two imitation exquisites at the "Varietés" one night, who were dressed to perfection, and must have studied the character thoroughly. The whole theatre was in a roar when they entered. Malcontents take the opportunity to show up the king and ministers, and these are excellent, too. One gets weary of fun. It is a life which becomes tedious long before carnival is over. It is a relief to sit down once more to books and pen.

The three last days are devoted to street-masking. This is the most ridiculous of all. Paris pours out its whole population upon the Boulevards, and guards are stationed to keep the goers and comers in separate lines, and prevent all collecting of groups on the pavé. People in the most grotesque and absurd dress pass on foot, and in loaded carriages, and all is nonsense and obscenity. It is difficult to conceive the motive which can induce grown-up people to go to the expense and trouble of such an exhibition, merely to amuse the world. A description of these follies would be waste of paper.

On the last night but one of the carnival, I went to a ball at the palace. We presented our invitations at the door, and mounted through piles of soldiers of the line, crowds of servants in the king's livery, and groves of exotics at the broad landing places, to the reception room. We were ushered into the Salle des Marechals—a large hall, the ceiling of which rises into the dome of the Tuileries, ornamented with full-length portraits of the living marshals of France. A gallery of a light airy structure runs round upon the capitals of the pillars, and this, when we entered, and at all the after hours of the ball, was crowded with loungers from the assembly beneath—producing a splendid effect, as their glittering uniforms passed and repassed under the flags and armor with which the ceilings were thickly hung. The royal train entered presently, and the band struck up a superb march. Three rows of velvet-covered seats, one above another, went round the hall, leaving a passage behind, and, in front of these, the queen and her family made a circuit of courtesy, followed by the wives of the ambassadors, among whom was our countrywoman, Mrs. Rives. Her majesty went smiling past, stopping here and there to speak to a lady whom she recognized, and the king followed her with his eternal and painfully forced smile, saying something to every second person he encountered. The princesses have good faces, and the second one has an expression of great delicacy and tenderness, but no beauty. As soon as the queen was seated, the band played a quadrille, and the crowd cleared away from the centre for the dance. The Duke of Orleans selected his partner, a pretty girl, who, I believe was English, and forward went the head couples to the exquisite music of the new opera—Robert le Diable.

I fell into the little cortége standing about the queen, and watched the interesting party dancing the head quadrille for an hour. The Duke of Orleans, who is nearly twenty, and seems a thoughtless, good-natured, immature young man, moved about very gracefully with his handsome figure, and seemed amused, and quite unconscious of the attention he drew. The princesses were vis-a-vis, and the second one, a dark-haired, slender, interesting girl of nineteen, had a polytechnic scholar for her partner. He was a handsome, gallant-looking fellow, who must have distinguished himself to have been invited to court, and I could not but admire the beautiful mixture of respect and self-confidence with which he demanded the hand of the princess from the lady of honor, and conversed with her during the dance. If royalty does not seal up the affections, I could scarce conceive how a being so decidedly of nature's best nobility, handsome, graceful, and confident, could come within the sphere of a sensitive-looking girl, like the princess Christine, and not leave more than a transient recollection upon her fancy. The music stopped, and I had been so occupied with my speculations upon the polytechnic boy, that I had scarcely noticed any other person in the dance. He led the princess back to her seat by the dame d'honneur, bowing low, colored a little, and mingled with the crowd. A few minutes after, I saw him in the gallery, quite alone, leaning over the railing, and looking down upon the scene below, having apparently abandoned the dance for the evening. From something in his face, and in the manner of resuming his sword, I was certain he had come to the palace with that single object, and would dance no more. I kept him in my eye most of the night, and am very sure he did not. If the little romance I wove out of it was not a true one, it was not because the material was improbable.

As I was looking still at the quadrille dancing before the queen, Dr. Bowring took my arm and proposed a stroll through the other apartments. I found that the immense crowd in the Salle des Marechals was but about one fifth of the assembly. We passed through hall after hall, with music and dancing in each, all crowded and gay alike, till we came at last to the Salle du Tróne where the old men were collected at card-tables and in groups for conversation. My distinguished companion was of the greatest use to me here, for he knew everybody, and there was scarce a person in the room who did not strongly excite my curiosity. One half of them at least were maimed; some without arms, and some with wooden legs, and faces scarred and weather-burnt, but all in full uniform, and nearly all with three or four orders of honor on the breast. You would have held your breath to have heard the recapitulation of their names. At one table sat Marshal Grouchy and General Excelmans; in a corner stood Marshal Soult, conversing with a knot of peers of France; and in the window nearest the door, General Bernard, our country's friend and citizen, was earnestly engaged in talking to a group of distinguished-looking men, two of whom, my companion said, were members of the chamber of deputies. We stood a moment, and a circle was immediately formed around Dr. Bowring, who is a great favorite among the literary and liberal people of France. The celebrated General Fabvier came up among others, and Cousin the poet. Fabvier, as you know, held a chief command in Greece, and was elected governor of Paris pro tem. after the "three days." He is a very remarkable-looking man, with a head almost exactly resembling that of the bust of Socrates. The engravings give him a more animated and warlike expression than he wears in private. Cousin is a mild, retired-looking man, and was one of the very few persons present not in the court uniform. Among so many hundred coats embroidered with gold, his plain black dress looked singularly simple and poet-like.

I left the diplomatist-poet conversing with his friends, and went back to the dancing rooms. Music and female beauty are more attractive metal than disabled generals playing at cards; and encountering in my way an attaché to the American legation, I inquired about one or two faces that interested me, and collecting information enough to pass through the courtesies of a dance, I found a partner and gave myself up, like the rest, to amusement.

Supper was served at two, and a more splendid affair could not be conceived. A long and magnificent hall on the other side of the Salle du Tróne was set with tables, covered with everything that France could afford, in the royal services of gold and silver, and in the greatest profusion. There was room enough for all the immense assemblage, and when the queen was seated with her daughters and ladies of honor, the company sat down and all was as quiet and well regulated as a dinner party of four.

After supper the dancing was resumed, and the queen remained till three o'clock. At her departure the band played cotillons or waltzes with figures, in which the Duke of Orleans displayed the grace for which he is celebrated, and at four, quite exhausted with fatigue and heat, I went with a friend or two into the long glass verandah, built by Napoleon as a promenade for the Empress Maria Louisa during her illness, where tea, coffee, and ices were served to those who wished them after supper. It was an interesting place enough, and had my eyes and limbs ached less, I should have liked to walk up and down, and muse a little upon its recollections, but swallowing my tea as hastily as possible, I was but too happy to make my escape and get home to bed.

LETTER XVIII.

CHOLERA—UNIVERSAL TERROR—FLIGHT OF THE INHABITANTS—CASES WITHIN THE WALLS OF THE PALACE—DIFFICULTY OF ESCAPE—DESERTED STREETS—CASES NOT REPORTED—DRYNESS OF THE ATMOSPHERE—PREVENTIVES RECOMMENDED—PUBLIC BATHS, ETC.

Cholera! Cholera! It is now the only topic. There is no other interest—no other dread—no other occupation, for Paris. The invitations for parties are at last recalled—the theatres are at last shut or languishing—the fearless are beginning to be afraid—people walk the streets with camphor bags and vinaigrettes at their nostrils—there is a universal terror in all classes, and a general flight of all who can afford to get away. I never saw a people so engrossed with one single and constant thought. The waiter brought my breakfast this morning with a pale face, and an apprehensive question, whether I was quite well. I sent to my boot-maker yesterday, and he was dead. I called on a friend, a Hanoverian, one of those broad-chested, florid, immortal-looking men, of whose health for fifty years, violence apart, one is absolutely certain, and he was at death's door with the cholera. Poor fellow! He had fought all through the revolution in Greece; he had slept in rain and cold, under the open sky, many a night, through a ten years' pursuit of the profession of a soldier of fortune, living one of the most remarkable lives, hitherto, of which I ever heard, and to be taken down here in the midst of ease and pleasure, reduced to a shadow with so vulgar and unwarlike a disease as this, was quite too much for his philosophy. He had been ill three days when I found him. He was emaciated to a skeleton in that short time, weak and helpless, and, though he is not a man to exaggerate suffering, he said he never had conceived such intense agony as he had endured. He assured me, that if he recovered, and should ever be attacked with it again, he would blow out his brains at the first symptom. Nothing but his iron constitution protracted the disorder. Most people who are attacked die in from three to twenty-four hours.

For myself, I have felt and still feel quite safe. My rooms are in the airiest quarter of Paris, facing the gardens of the Tuileries, with windows overlooking the king's; and, as far as air is concerned, if his majesty considers himself well situated, it would be quite ridiculous in so insignificant a person as myself to be alarmed. With absolute health, confident spirits, and tolerably regular habits, I have usually thought one may defy almost anything but love or a bullet. To-day, however, there have been, they say, two cases within the palace-walls, members of the royal household, and Casimir Perier, who probably lives well and has enough to occupy his mind, is very low with it, and one cannot help feeling that he has no certain exemption, when a disease has touched both above and below him. I went to-day to the Messagerie to engage my place for Marseilles, on the way to Italy, but the seats are all taken, in both mail-post and diligence, for a fortnight to come, and, as there are no extras in France, one must wait his turn. Having done my duty to myself by the inquiry, I shall be content to remain quiet.

I have just returned from a social tea-party at a house of one of the few English families left in Paris. It is but a little after ten, and the streets, as I came along, were as deserted and still as if it were a city of the dead. Usually, until four or five in the morning, the same streets are thronged with carriages hurrying to and fro, and always till midnight the trottoirs are crowded with promenaders. To-night I scarce met a foot-passenger, and but one solitary cabriolet in a walk of a mile. The contrast was really impressive. The moon was nearly full, and high in the heavens, and the sky absolutely without a trace of a cloud; nothing interrupted the full broad light of the moon, and the empty streets were almost as bright as at noon-day; and, as I crossed the Place Vendome, I could hear, for the first time since I have been in Paris, though I have passed it at every hour of the night, the echo of my footsteps reverberated from the walls around. You should have been in these crowded cities of Europe to realize the impressive solemnity of such solitude.

It is said that fifty thousand people have left Paris within the past week. Adding this to the thousand a day who are struck with the cholera, and the attendance necessary to the sick, and a thinned population is sufficiently accounted for. There are, however, hundreds ill of this frightful disease, whose cases are not reported. It is only those who are taken to the hospitals, the poor and destitute, who are numbered in the official statements. The physicians are wearied out with their private practice. The medical lectures are suspended, and a regular physician is hardly to be had at all. There is scarce a house in which some one has not been taken. You see biers and litters issuing from almost every gate, and the better ranks are no longer spared. A sister of the premier, M. Perier, died yesterday; and it was reported at the Bourse, that several distinguished persons, who have been ill of it, are also dead. No one feels safe; and the consternation and dread on every countenance you meet, is enough to chill one's very blood. I went out to-day for a little exercise, not feeling very well, and I was glad to get home again. Every creature looks stricken with a mortal fear. And this among a French population, the gayest and merriest of people under all depressions ordinarily, is too strong a contrast not to be felt painfully. There is something singular in the air, too; a disagreeable, depressing dryness, which the physicians say must change, or all Paris will be struck with the plague. It is clear and cold, but almost suffocating with dryness.

It is very consoling in the midst of so much that is depressing, that the preventives recommended against the cholera are so agreeable. "Live well," say the doctors, "and bathe often. Abstain from excesses, keep a clear head and good spirits, and amuse yourself as much and as rationally as possible." It is a very excellent recipe for happiness, let alone the cholera. There is great room for a nice observance of this system in Paris, particularly the eating and bathing. The baths are delightful. You are received in handsome saloons, opening upon a garden in the centre of the building, ornamented with statues and fountains, the journals lying upon the sofas, and everything arranged with quite the luxury of a palace. The bathing-rooms are furnished with taste; the baths are of marble, and covered inside with spotlessly white linen cloths; the water is perfumed, and you may lie and take your coffee, or have your breakfast served upon the mahogany cover which shuts you in—a union of luxuries which is enough to enervate a cynic. When you are ready to come out, a pull of the bell brings a servant, who gives you a peignoir—a long linen wrapper, heated in an oven, in the warm folds of which you are enveloped, and in three minutes are quite dry. In this you may sit, at your ease, reading, or musing, or lie upon the sofa without the restraint of a tight dress, till you are ready to depart; and then four or five francs, something less than a dollar, pays for all.

LETTER XIX.

MORNING VIEW FROM THE RUE RIVOLI—THE BOIS DE BOULOGNE—GUICCIOLI—SISMONDI THE HISTORIAN, ETC.

It is now the middle of April, and, sitting at my window on the Rue Rivoli, I look through one of the long, clipped avenues of the Tuileries, and see an arch of green leaves, the sun of eight o'clock in the morning just breaking through the thin foliage and dappling the straight, even gravel-walk below, with a look of summer that makes my heart leap. The cholera has put an end to dissipation, and one gets up early, from necessity. It is delicious to step out before breakfast, and cross the street into those lovely gardens, for an hour or two of fresh air and reflection. It is warm enough now to sit on the stone benches about the fountains, by the time the dew is dry; and I know nothing so contemplative as the occupation of watching these royal swans, in the dreamy, almost imperceptible motion with which they glide around the edges of the basins. The gold fish swim up and circle about the breast of the imperial birds with a motion almost as idle; and the old wooden-legged soldier, who has been made warden of the gardens for his service, sits nodding on one of the chairs, or drawing fortifications with his stick in the gravel; and so it happens, that, in the midst of a gay and busy city one may feel always a luxurious solitude; and, be he ever so poor, loiter all day if he will, among scenes which only regal munificence could provide for him. With the Seine bounding them on one side, the splendid uniform façade of the Rue Rivoli on the other, the palace stretching across the southern terrace, and the thick woods of the Champs Elysées at the opposite gate, where could one go in the world to give his taste or his eye a more costly or delightful satisfaction?

The Bois de Boulogne, about which the Parisians talk so much, is less to my taste. It is a level wood of small trees, covering a mile or two square, and cut from corner to corner with straight roads for driving. The soil is sandy, and the grass grows only in tufts, the walks are rough, and either muddy or dusty always; and, barring the equipages and the pleasure of a word in passing an acquaintance, I find a drive to this famous wood rather a dull business. I want either one thing or the other—cultivated grounds like the Tuileries, or the wild wood.

I have just left the Countess Guiccioli, with whom I have been acquainted for some two or three weeks. She is very much frightened at the cholera, and thinks of going to America. The conversation turned principally upon Shelley, whom of course she knew intimately; and she gave me one of his letters to herself as an autograph. She says at times he was a little crazy—"fou," as she expressed it—but that there never was a nobler or a better man. Lord Byron, she says, loved him like a brother. She is still in correspondence with Shelley's wife, of whom also she speaks with the greatest affection. There were several miniatures of Byron hanging up in the room, and I asked her if any of them were perfect in the resemblance. "No," she said, "this was the most like him," taking down an exquisitely-finished miniature by an Italian artist, "mais il etaît beaucoup plus beau—beaucoup! beaucoup!" She reiterated the word with a very touching tenderness, and continued to look at the picture for some time, either forgetting our presence, or affecting it. She speaks English sweetly, with a soft, slow, honeyed accent, breaking into French when ever she gets too much interested to choose her words. She went on talking in French of the painters who had drawn Byron, and said the American, West's was the best likeness. I did not like to tell her that West's picture of herself was excessively flattered. I am sure no one would know her from the engraving of it, at least. Her cheek bones are high, her forehead is badly shaped, and, altogether, the frame of her features is decidedly ugly. She dresses in the worst taste, too, and yet, with all this, and poetry and celebrity aside, the Countess Guiccioli is both a lovely and a fascinating woman, and one whom a man of sentiment would admire, even at this age, very sincerely, but not for beauty. She has white and regular teeth, however, and her hair is incomparably the most beautiful I ever saw. It is of the richest and glossiest gold, silken and luxuriant, and changes, as the light falls upon it, with a mellow softness, than which nothing could be lovelier. It is this and her indescribably winning manner which are lost in a picture, and therefore, it is perhaps fair that she should be otherwise flattered. Her drawing-room is one of the most agreeable in Paris at present, and is one of the chief agrémens which console me for a detention in an atmosphere so triste as well as dangerous.

My bed-room window opens upon the court in the interior of the hotel Rivoli, in which I lodge. In looking out occasionally upon my very near neighbors opposite, I have frequently observed a gray-headed, scholar-like, fine-looking old man, writing at a window in the story below. One does not trouble himself much about his fellow-lodgers, and I had seen this gentleman at his work at all hours, for a month or more, without curiosity enough to inquire even his name. This morning the servant came in, with a Mon Dieu! and said M. Sismondi was frightened by the cholera, and was leaving his lodgings at that moment. The name startled me, and making some inquiries, I found that my gray-headed neighbor was no other than the celebrated historian of Italian literature, and that I had been living under the same roof with him for weeks, and watching him at his classical labors, without being at all aware of the honor of his neighborhood. He is a kind, benevolent-looking man, of about sixty, I should think; and always had a peculiarly affectionate manner to his wife, who, I am told by the valet, is an Englishwoman. I regretted exceedingly the opportunity I had lost of knowing him, for there are few writers of whom one retains a more friendly and agreeable remembrance.

In a conversation with Mr. Cooper, the other day he was remarking of how little consequence any one individual found himself in Paris, even the most distinguished. We were walking in the Tuileries, and the remark was elicited by my pointing out to him one or two celebrated persons, whose names are sufficiently known, but who walk the public promenades, quite unnoticed and unrecognised. He said he did not think there were five people in Paris who knew him at sight, though his works were advertised in all the bookstores, and he had lived in Paris one or two years, and walked there constantly. This was putting a strong case, for the French idolize Cooper; and the peculiarly translateable character of his works makes them read even better in a good translation than in the original. It is so all over the continent, I am told. The Germans, Italians, and Spaniards, prefer Cooper to Scott; and it is easily accounted for when one remembers how much of the beauty of the Waverly novels depends on their exquisite style, and how peculiarly Cooper's excellence lies in his accurate, definite, tangible descriptions. There is not a more admired author in Europe than Cooper, it is very certain; and I am daily asked whether he is in America at present—so little do the people of these crowded cities interest themselves about that which is immediately at their elbows.

LETTER XX.

GENERAL BERTRAND—FRIEND OF LADY MORGAN—PHRENOLOGY—DR. SPURZHEIM—HIS LODGINGS—PROCESS OF TAKING A CAST OF THE HEAD—INCARCERATION OF DR. BOWRING AND DE POTTER—DAVID THE SCULPTOR—VISIT OF DR. SPURZHEIM TO THE UNITED STATES.

My room-mate called a day or two since on General Bertrand, and yesterday he returned the visit, and spent an hour at our lodgings. He talked of Napoleon with difficulty, and became very much affected when my friend made some inquiries about the safety of the body at St. Helena. The inquiry was suggested by some notice we had seen in the papers of an attempt to rob the tomb of Washington. The General said that the vault was fifteen feet deep, and covered by a slab that could not be moved without machinery. He told us that Madame Bertrand had many mementoes of the Emperor, which she would be happy to show us, and we promised to visit him.

At a party, a night or two since, I fell into conversation with an English lady, who had lived several years in Dublin, and was an intimate friend of Lady Morgan. She was an uncommonly fine woman, both in appearance and conversational powers, and told me many anecdotes of the authoress, defending her from all the charges usually made against her, except that of vanity, which she allowed. I received, on the whole, the impression that Lady Morgan's goodness of heart was more than an offset to her certainly very innocent weaknesses. My companion was much amused at an American's asking after the "fender in Kildare street;" though she half withdrew her cordiality when I told her I knew the countryman of mine who wrote the account of Lady Morgan, of which she complains so bitterly in the "Book of the Boudoir." It was this lady with whom the fair authoress "dined in the Chaussée d'Antin," so much to her satisfaction.

While we were conversing, the lady's husband came up, and finding that I was an American, made some inquiries about the progress of phrenology on the other side of the water. Like most enthusiasts in the science, his own head was a remarkably beautiful one; and I soon found that he was the bosom friend of Dr. Spurzheim, to whom he offered to introduce me. We made an engagement for the next day, and the party separated.

My new acquaintance called on me the next morning, according to appointment, and we went together to Dr. Spurzheim's residence. The passage at the entrance was lined with cases, in which stood plaster casts of the heads of distinguished men, orators, poets, musicians—each class on its particular shelf—making altogether a most ghastly company. The doctor received my companion with great cordiality, addressing him in French, and changing to very good German-English when he made any observation to me. He is a tall, large-boned man, and resembles Harding, the American artist, very strikingly. His head is finely marked; his features are bold, with rather a German look; and his voice is particularly winning, and changes its modulations, in argument, from the deep, earnest tone of a man, to an almost child-like softness. The conversation soon turned upon America, and the doctor expressed, in ardent terms, his desire to visit the United States, and said he had thought of accomplishing it the coming summer. He spoke of Dr. Channing—said he had read all his works with avidity and delight, and considered him one of the clearest and most expansive minds of the age. If Dr. Channing had not strong developments of the organs of ideality and benevolence, he said, he should doubt his theory more than he had ever found reason to. He knew Webster and Professor Silliman by reputation, and seemed to be familiar with our country, as few men in Europe are. One naturally, on meeting a distinguished phrenologist, wishes to have his own developments pronounced upon; but I had been warned by my friend that Dr. Spurzheim refused such examinations as a general principle, not wishing to deceive people, and unwilling to run the risk of offending them. After a half hour's conversation, however, he came across the room, and putting his hands under my thick masses of hair, felt my head closely all over, and mentioned at once a quality, which, right or wrong, has given a tendency to all my pursuits in life. As he knew absolutely nothing of me, and the gentleman who introduced me knew no more, I was a little startled. The doctor then requested me to submit to the operation of having a cast taken of my head, an offer which was too kind and particular to be declined; and, appointing an hour to be at his rooms the following day, we left him.

I was there again at twelve, the morning after, and found De Potter (the Belgian patriot) and Dr. Bowring, with the phrenologist, waiting to undergo the same operation. The preparations looked very formidable, A frame, of the length of the human body, lay in the middle of the room, with a wooden bowl to receive the head, a mattress, and a long white dress to prevent stain to the clothes. As I was the youngest, I took my turn first. It was very like a preparation for being beheaded. My neck was bared, my hair cut, and the long white dress put on. The back of the head is taken first; and, as I was only immersed up to the ears in the liquid plaster, this was not very alarming. The second part, however, demanded more patience. My head was put once more into the stiffened mould of the first half, and as soon as I could get my features composed I was ordered to shut my eyes; my hair was oiled and laid smooth, and the liquid plaster poured slowly over my mouth, eyes, and forehead, till I was cased completely in a stiffening mask. The material was then poured on thickly, till the mask was two or three inches thick, and the voices of those standing over me were scarcely audible. I breathed pretty freely through the orifices at my nose; but the dangerous experiment of Mademoiselle Sontag, who was nearly smothered in the same operation, came across my mind rather vividly; and it seemed to me that the doctor handled the plaster quite too ungingerly, when he came to mould about my nostrils. After a half hour's imprisonment, the plaster became sufficiently hardened, and the thread which was laid upon my face was drawn through, dividing the mask into two parts. It was then gradually removed, pulling very tenaciously upon my eyelashes and eyebrows, and leaving all the cavities of my face filled with particles of lime. The process is a tribute to vanity, which one would not be willing to pay very often.

I looked on at Dr. Bowring's incarceration with no great feeling of relief. It is rather worse to see than to experience, I think. The poet is a nervous man; and as long as the muscles of his face were visible, his lips, eyelids, and mouth, were quivering so violently that I scarcely believed it would be possible to get an impression of them. He has a beautiful face for a scholar—clear, well-cut, finished features, expressive of great purity of thought; and a forehead of noble amplitude, white and polished as marble. His hair is black and curling (indicating in most cases, as Dr. Spurzheim remarked, activity of mind), and forms a classical relief to his handsome temples. Altogether, his head would look well in a picture, though his ordinary and ungraceful dress, and quick, bustling manner, rather destroy the effect of it in society.