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severity of the English summer," I amused myself for a while by looking at the progress of the preparations. The English are not so expert at turning cities inside out as we are. And Paris would have been converted into a city of bandboxes, or have exhibited a hundred palaces of lath, tapestry, and painted calico fit for as many Emperors; or have run up a dozen amphitheatres of Titus, with all their flags, embroidered canopies, and all the lions and tigers of the Jardin des Plantes gamboling in their arenas, before John Bull was able to disfigure one of his old brick-built streets. But it was done at last; and by the help of planks, enough to have stripped a Norwegian forest of all its pines, of vast quantities of canvass and calico, and of zealous carpentering for a week together, London began to look unlike itself, and like a Continental city on a fête day. This finery made it look odd, without making it look gay. The nature of the place predominated over the powers of the brush and the hammer.

Your friend Charles D. and I employed ourselves in imagining what the venerable city of rost bif and smoke most resembled in its new costume and its ancient gravity. He said that it was most like the Bœuf Gras, that most honest of beasts, and most capital specimen of its kind, covered from horn to hoof with ribbons and garlands, yet seeming utterly regardless of the honour, and going through the show with all the original seriousness of his character. Another suggestion was that of a company of the Banlieu preparing for a review in the Champ de Mars; the gentlemen of the trowel, the forge, and the milk pail, adopting the sword, the sash, and the shako, and marching to the sound of trumpet and drum with the dignity of Sunday saviours of their country. Or, most questionable and flattering of all, our venerable and excellent acquaintance, Madame La Contesse, investing herself with the costume of that fairest of the fashionable, and most fashionable of the fair, that pride of ambassadresses, Madame De Hon, and forgetting the fifty years interval between her and beauty, going to a fancy ball at the Tuilleries in silk-web draperies and silver wings, as Psyche. Such was our contrivance for escaping the recollection that we were walking

through some of the heaviest showers that I have seen even in this showery country.

Still the carpentering, the nailing up of canvass, and the torrents of rain went on with equal activity. The sulky-looking streets were rapidly transforming into the look of a vast booth at a vast fair, and it wanted nothing but the canals, we had water enough, and the masquers, to imagine ourselves a thousand miles from the huge city of London, and preparing for the carnival in the Piazza di San Marco, in Venice, the lovely, the de licious, and alas! the dying.

A large party at the hotel of the embassy. The Marshal's arrival has been the signal for throwing off that intolerable darkness which seems to be the etiquette of ambassadorship in this region of tempests. The people are, like their climate, calm, of the most overwhelming calmness, and to be roused by nothing but a war or a revolution. Since I have come here, the spirit of the season, or the country, had sunk me at least fifty degrees in the thermometer. The mercury rapidly approached zero. What was to be done, where a ball scarcely once a month, a drawing-room scarcely once a quarter, and the closed windows and doors of every embassy for six months in the year together, made life one long funeral procession? In Paris, under such circumstances, we should have an emeute, nothing else could restore the circulation of the blood. In Italy we should go upon the stage. In Vienna we should smoke opium and swallow sour-krout. In Stamboul we should break into the Harem, or take the Grand Turk by the beard; any thing either to extinguish our sensibilities, or to stimulate them. But here the English are a provident nation. Till my residence at the embassy I did not perceive the use of their multitude of canals! But the Marshal's ambassadorship-extraordinary has promised us a change; saved your friend from the necessity of plunging himself and his crimes together into the bottom of one of those watery receptacles for attachés tired of life, and saved you from receiving as a last legacy my opera-glass, the payment of my debts, and the honour of discliarging my pension to--, instead of these little despatches from the very

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I went last night to see the "Coronation." This, too, twelve hours before its existence. But I hate to be taken by surprise in any thing, and as one of the suburb theatres exhibited all the glories of English royalty in advance, I ordered my cabriolet, and enjoyed its trumpets, drums, huzzas, and horses, by anticipation. Nothing could be more loyal and laughable. The house, perfectly suburban, a phrase which, as you have no such idea in Paris or any where else on the continent, implies at once showy and squalid, tremendous dancing, and sometimes very pretty figurantes actors; every thing that is outrageous, and audiences good-humoured à l'outrance, grumbling only when they insist on the encore of some song, which would break the voices and the hearts of all the Italians on earth, and bursting out into laughter in the very depths of melodrame.

I went to bed with my eyes full of stage-lights, tinsel, and odd faces, and dreamed that I was ambassador-extraordinary on a mission to marry the daughter of the great Mogul by proxy to the Emperor of Mexico. A shower of diamonds was poured upon me by the magnificent father-in-law, and, choking with brilliancy, I woke, and found my valet standing, coffee in hand, by my bed-side, and shaking me from my slumber, to say that it was five in the morning, and all the world was up!

As it was not well to continue in rear of all the world, I rose, and after despatching the trivialities which make us fit to mingle in the presence of our fellow men, I went to look for the house of our friend D, if, with its new gown and petticoat of calico, and mask of planks and paint, I should be able to recognise it again. valet had told me truth, but he had not told me the whole truth. The day had begun with gloom, the gloom soon deepened into rain, and all

My

June 28.

threatened wofully for the canvass houses, and for the fair myriads who were so soon to take up their abode in them. But all London set the elements at defiance; all was in motion; the principal streets were a perpetual line of life, a gulf-stream of man, woman, and child, all hurrying in the same direction-towards the west. The movement was almost à Corso, with carriages crowding after each other and flying along, filled with women fashionably dressed; here and there an officer of rank enjoying the luxury of a whole vehicle to himself, and looking contemptuously enough on the pedestrians on the trottoir. But, ex

cept for the crowd, the streets looked as gloomy as the weather; the shops were all shut, and as the shops form all the show of London, and as they are shut only on Sundays, or on the days of Royal funerals, coronations being rare visitants, a stranger suddenly dropped on this globe of ours would have had only his choice of conjecturing that the middle of the week had suddenly jumped back to the beginning, or that there was a new hiatus in the House of Hanover.

But, when I reached the scene of the royal programme, the gloom was all past. Round me were the faces, the bonnets, the hats, and the clamours of at least a hundred thousand people. From the spot where the bronze statue of the first Charles looks down the vista, at whose end he lost his head, all before me was a sea of heads and all in full motion. Some taking their places on the scaffoldings raised in front of the houses; some mounting the posts of the gas lamps, which then bore the true illuminations of the age, whatever might be the state of their coats and breeches; some fixing themselves steadily in positions on the trottoir, with the desperate determination not to be unfixed for four or five solid hours; and others, like myself, elbowing their way through the mul

titude to the houses where their places had been kept. Whatever Charles and his charger might have thought of the vista, to me it was remarkably lively. As far as the eye could glance all was a succession of waving banners, the flags of every nation, and of none, hung out from balconies; scaffold above scaffold, looking in the distance like vast tents, of every colour of the rainbow; the roofs of the houses crested with groups of gathering spectators, which, still rather scattered, and looking loungingly below, might at that distance have been taken for scattered statues. At that moment, too, a regiment of heavy cavalry entered the street, to take up its place in the procession; and the glitter of their brass helmets, their scarlet coats, and the prancing of their handsome horses, gave the mass exactly the relief which the eye of a painter would have desired. The sun, too, threw in an auspicious burst, and the long column of the cavalry under it looked like a stream of fire working its way through a stubborn and sullen-coloured soil.

We Frenchmen have heard so much of the buffalo spirit of John Bull, that I had prepared myself for a tough struggle. But I made my way with tolerable ease, neither fought, nor was challenged to the combat; was neither trampled to death, nor called a frog-eating villain for not having English for my mother tongue. On the contrary, I escaped without either proving my heroism or being forced to deny my country. Frenchman as I was I passed on, saw every thing that I wanted to see; went every where, during the day, where I wished to go, and preserved my limbs and my conscience entire, till I took them both with me to bed.

My first movement had all the precipitation of fear. D——'s house was at the bottom of the immense cul de sac before me. I feared for my place, my breakfast, and my corporeal existence. I plunged on accordingly. But I reached our friend's with such comparative ease that, like all who are alarmed without cause, on getting rid of my alarm, I adopted the peril ous course of leaving my proper balcony, and again returning into the crowd, and seeing all that was to be seen before the arrival of the pageant.

Yet I had some compunctions on

the subject. You know D--'s hospitality. On this day it shone. His English father gave him the taste for pieces de resistance, solid masses of every thing eatable which distinguishes the native of this country. His French mother gave him the propensity to enjoy every thing enjoyable, which follows the native of ours every where, from Paris to Kamschatka. His house to-day was a complete refectory. Its tables would have made one of the fathers of the Chartreuse break his vow of eating nothing but pulse, or have satisfied the superb longings of a cardinal. They were piled with such luxuries as London can muster; I admit, not such as the Paris cuisine would produce to be proud of, but very well notwithstanding. We first had been summoned to breakfast. The English, it must be acknowledged, breakfast well. They even exhibit some taste in the arrangement. Other nations overload the table, or starve the sitters. In England there is the happy medium. Tea, coffee, toast, and eggs, with a few slices of ham, intermixed with wings of chickens, form the juste milieu. All beyond spoils the appetite, occupies attention, and degenerates into dinner. As for us, Frenchmen never breakfast, except where we take our chocolate in a caffe. As the ladies never make their appearance in the morning, and as we never do any thing without them, our mornings pass in picking our teeth, tying our neckcloths, and calculating when we are to dine. The formality of breakfasting is therefore out of the question.

At the tables was another feature equally novel to a Frenchman, and captivating to all the world. Between forty and fifty ladies, generally young, for the matrons had probably been scared by the prospect of an ultrasqueezing; generally pretty, all very handsomely costumed, and all in full smiles, sat down to the table. The gentlemen at first did themselves the honour of supplying those fair creatures with all that was necessary for their appetites, whose delicacy, fine and fashionable as it was, was not altogether proof against the singularity of rising at six o'clock instead of noon, and of inhaling the morning air instead of the midnight effluvia of the ball

room. When the ladies had sipped and smiled to the extent of their inclinations, they retired, and the gentlemen took their places. In this happy alternation of indulgences we spent an hour or two, and if the English proverb is true, that "a good beginning is half the battle," a proverb, in my opinion, much superior to the tardiness of the old Roman saw, that "it is the end which crowns the mark," the gaiety of the morning's meal gave promise of a goodly day.

I am determined to say no more of the rain. But, once for all, I must say, that if the whole body of the London citizens had been one mighty glass tube, and the whole circulation within it quicksilver, the multitude could not have exhibited more susceptibility to every passing cloud. Half a million of eyes were turned every half minute upon the sky, and, as if to tantalize them, that sky was a perpetual succession of clouds and sunshine. Below me the street was lined with a detachment of the Foot Guards. The officers put on their blue cloaks, and made themselves ready for a winter campaign. A smart shower came down. The hubbub of the streets instantly subsided into silence. John Bull drew his hat across his brows, and awaited the deluge with the fortitude of one prepared to be drowned on the spot but not to be moved. To reward his constancy, I suppose, the face of the sky finally changed, the sun blazed forth, every countenance was lighted up along with it, and from that moment commenced a lovely day—a day made expressly for this national festivity.

I now sallied forth in good earnest, and directed my march to the Queen's palace, naturally the centre of all attraction. I found the Park in which it stands crowded; a detachment of artillery posted in view of the palace to fire salutes; bodies of cuirassiers at intervals, and the infantry of the Royal Guards under arms.

You have asked me what kind of monster is this palace? I have not now time to talk of it; but the descriptions which reached us in Paris were ridiculously en caricature. It is certainly not a planet among palaces, nor even a meteor. But it has merits much superior to any thing that I had been taught to expect. It is even a showy edifice, elegant in its con

ception, and finished in its details. But its position is unfortunate. It touches a suburb filled with steamengines and chimneys enough to blacken ten palaces. The Parthenon, in its site, would have worn a robe of soot in a week. The temple of Luxor would have looked like a colossal blacksmith's shop. The palace of Queen Victoria is, therefore, any thing but an emblem of her innocence. It is the atrabilious reverse of “ Candidior nive," and has the look of one hackneyed in the ways, and those the most fuliginous ways, of the world. The plan, too, is no more fortunate than the position. It forms three sides of a square, the next deformity to four. The wings thus effect the purpose directly opposite to that of all other wings of earth, or air, if that be lightThose wings darken and de

ness.

press.

After all, the most graceful, as well as the noblest of all ornaments to a great palace is the colonnade. Connecting the outer buildings with the body of the edifice, they are the pen-feathers, the strength and decoration of the wing together. Whether smooth or fluted, whether surmounted with the severe beauty of the Ionic capital, or the luxuriancy of the Composite, they are always a charm and the chief fault of the palace of the young English Queen is, that it sacrifices this truly Greek spell to sullen magnitude and heavy solidity.

But the view in front is pretty and gentle; a sort of Tuilleries garden, but without the statues, but with what is infinitely more refreshing to the eye -a sheet of water, broken by one or two little islands; primitive spots, whose only inhabitants are waterfowl. The Englishman shows in every thing that he is born surrounded by the sea. Wherever he is surrounded by the land, he makes a mimic ocean, indulges his amphibious instincts by a pond in front, and fabricates a little St George's Channel at the bottom of his garden.

Far be it from me to decry our Tuilleries, the multitude of days which I have spent under its shades in that most delightful of all occupations, doing nothing; the quantity of newspaper lucubrations from the pens of all our illuminati,from Armand Carrell, down to the incarcerated editors of the Tribune, while I was imbibing the glorious science of politics at two sous a

day; and the half-million of black, brown, demi-brown, and blonde of the makers of human finery and soothers of human cares, who pour through the little groves in an uninterrupted stream of sportiveness, smiles, and short petticoats, have made it to me classic ground. Still it does not engross all the loveliness of the globe. Its marble heroes, rude as they may be, its stunted trees, its fishes gasping for water, its loungers gasping for air, and its philosophers gasping for news, revolutions, and young Napoleon, do not altogether supersede the velvet softness and showery green of even this English promenade, this quiet and cool water-giving quietness and coolness to every thing round it; the trees, which, young as they are, seem never to have worn the stays which make our French trees look so prodigiously well-behaved; all have a sense of Nature's having her own way that I am beginning to like. I almost doubt whether the spot would be much improved by a naked Meleager exhibiting his attitudes in the purest marble before an equally naked Atalanta, or even the three Graces of Canova," as palpable as the most unhesitating chisel could make them, and revealing to the eyes of La Nation Boutiquière those Parian proportions which were once reserved for the petits soupers of Olym. pus.

But now trumpets and drums began to sound. The plot was evidently thickening, and I made my way to the esplanade in front of the palace; the display here was brilliant. A triumphal arch, exactly modelled on ours in the Place du Carousal, placed, with equal bad taste, as a gateway to the palace, and differing from it only in having cost twice the money, and being the repetition of an error, bore upon its summit the national flag, attended by sailors, its natural guardians. On either side were lofty scaffoldings, crowded with ladies, the palace roof had its share of spectators; and every eye was fixed on the portico from which the young sovereign was to descend.

One of the most remarkable features of the whole ceremonial was the presence of the Foreign Ambassadors. These functionaries abound at the English Court. They came flocking from every corner of the earth. Nations unheard of till within these half dozen years, and whose political con

cerns consist in cutting off the heads of a whole dynasty when they grow tired of them with their heads on, fortunate for the national honour if they do not roast and eat them; republics whose existence began last month, and will close the next, all send diplomatists here to represent the high interests of their country, and cultivate their own by dining and dancing at Court and every where else that they can. But on this occasion we, always the masters of the ceremonies to the great Salle de Danse of Europe, we, par excellence the nation of gallantry, had the honour of setting the example of homage to the sex, we resolved to send our oldest and baldest Marshal to dance before the pretty Queen Victoria.

Eti

Our gallantry, too, was of some service. The ambassadorial faculty chiefly consisting in two points, keeping secrets that every one knows, and religiously respecting ceremonies that all the world besides have exploded; the proposal that those solemn personages should go in the procession, produced a universal shudder. quette was in despair, the whole body of attaches were ordered to prepare them selves for the last extremities, and their principals were ready to die, portfolio in hand, rather than to hazard this unheard of innovation. Old Soult had the merit of bringing them to their senses. Whether he used his old argument of the sabre and the cannon, that "ultima ratio" which the republicans learned so quickly from the kings, and the pupils handsomely paid back upon their teachers; or whether he appealed to such understandings as nature has given to Austrians, Prussians, Swedes, and Spaniards, are among the secrets of their function, and are to be kept in profound secrecy till any living man shall trouble himself about the matter. Probably he suggested that, as it was the purpose of their mission to be present at the performance in the metropolitan Cathedral, and as they could go by no other way than the streets, they might as well go along with her Majesty as without her. At all events, they came to the determination of joining the file, first mentally protesting against the breach of etiquette, and severally, as I am told, sending off couriers to enquire of their Courts, what was to be done in this formidable emergency,

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