there magnificent inroads among the picturesque garrets of the left bank; the logis de Nevers, the logis de Rome, the logis de Rheims, which have been swept away; the hôtel de Cluny, which still subsists for the consolation of the artist, and the tower of which was so stupidly uncrowned some years ago. That Roman palace with beautiful circular arches, near Cluny, was the baths of Julian. There were likewise many abbeys, of a more severe beauty than the hotels, but neither less handsome, nor less spacious. The colleges, which are in fact the intermediate link between the cloister and the world, formed the mean, in the series of buildings, between the mansions and the abbeys, with an austerity full of elegance, a sculpture less gaudy than that of the palaces, an architecture less serious than that of the convents. Unfortunately, scarcely any vestiges are left of these edifices in which Gothic art steered with such precision a middle course between luxury and economy. The churches, and they were both numerous and splendid, in the university, and of every age of architecture, from the circular arches of St. Julian, to the pointed ones of St. Severin,-the churches overtopped all; and like an additional harmony in this mass of harmonies, they shot up every instant above the slashed gables, the open-work pinnacles and belfries, and the airy spires, the line of which also was but a magnificent exaggeration of the acute angle of the roofs."

The description of the Ville then follows, after

C

which the topographer sums up the whole, somewhat lengthily, yet admitting of abbreviation with difficulty. "The Paris of that time was not merely a handsome city; it was an homogeneous city, an architectural and historical production of the Middle Ages; a chronicle of stone. It was a city formed of two strata only, the bastard Roman and the Gothic, for the pure Roman had long before disappeared, excepting at the baths of Julian, where it still peered above the thick crust of the Middle Ages. As for the Celtic stratum, no specimens of that were now to be found even in digging wells.

"Fifty years later, when the revival came to blend with this unity, so severe and yet so diversified, the dazzling luxury of its fantasies and its systems; its extravagancies of Roman arches, Greek columus, and Gothic ellipses; its sculpture so delicate and so ideal; its particular style of arabesques and acanthi; its architectural paganism, contemporaneous with Luther; Paris was perhaps still more beautiful, though less harmonious to the eye and the mind. But this splendid moment was of short duration; the revival was not impartial; it was not content with building up, it wanted to throw down: it is true enough that it needed room. Thus Gothic Paris was complete but for a minute. Scarcely was St. Jacques de la Boucherie finished when the demolition of the old Louvre was begun.

"Since that time the great city has been daily increasing in deformity. The Gothic Paris, which

swept away the bastard Roman, has been, in its turn, swept away; but can any one tell what Paris has succeeded it?

"There is the Paris of Catherine de Medici, at the Tuilleries; the Paris of Henri II., at the Hotel de Ville; two edifices still in a grand style; the Paris of Henri IV., at the Place Royale-fronts of brick with stone quoins, and slated roofs-tri-colored houses; the Paris of Louis XIII., at Val de Grace, a squat, clumsy style, something paunch-bellied in the column, and hunch-backed in the dome; the Paris of Louis XIV., at the Invalides, grand, rich, gilded and cold; the Paris of Louis XV., at St. Sulpicevolutes, knots of ribands, clouds, vermicellis, chicories, and nobody knows what, all in stone; the Paris of Louis XVI., at the Pantheon, a wretched copy of St. Peter's at Rome; the Paris of the Republic, at the School of Medicine, a poor Greek and Roman style, resembling the Coliseum or the Parthenon, as the constitution of the Year Three does the laws of Minos-it is called in architecture, the Messidor Style; the Paris of Napoleon, at the Place Vendôme, this is sublime, a column of bronze, made of cannon; the Paris of the Restoration, at the Exchange, a very white colonnade, supporting a very smooth frieze; the whole is square, and cost twenty millions.

"Admirable, however, as the Paris of the present day appears to you, build up and put together again, in imagination, the Paris of the fifteenth century;

look at the light through that surprising host of steeples, towers and belfries; pour forth amidst the immense city, break against the points of its islands, compress within the arches of the bridges the current of the Seine, with its large patches of green and yellow, more changeable than a serpent's skin; define clearly the Gothic profile of this old Paris upon an horizon of azure; make its contour float in a wintry fog which clings to its innumerable chimneys; drown it in deep night, and observe the extraordinary play of darkness and light in this sombre labyrinth of buildings; throw into it a ray of moonlight, which shall show its faint outline and cause the huge heads of the towers to stand forth from amid the mist; or revert to that dark picture, touch up with shade the thousand acute angles of the spires and gables, and make them stand out more jagged than a shark's jaw, upon the copper-colored sky of evening. Now compare the two."

We enjoyed the panorama of Paris from the dome of the Pantheon for a long time, each mass of building forming the centre of a groupe of historical recollections. When we had descended, we repaired to the tomb of St. Genevieve in St. Etienne; and it must be confessed, that the memory of the pious dark ages was very soothing after the glare of enlightened sin which hangs about the capitals of the Pantheon.

We spent the greater part of a day in the cemetery of Père la Chaise. In summer it must be a

beautiful lounge, and a lounge is exactly what most make of it. It may very well be questioned whether the effect of interesting cemeteries is not bad. There is a kind of sentimental way of thinking of death, which is anything but solemn; and there is also a voluptuous way of thinking of it, which is equally uncatholic, and it is not unfrequently observed among the earliest symptoms of mental derangement. The The grave is regarded as a pillow to rest on, instead of a passage onward; death as an end instead of a beginning. There is great temptation to this. We like to play with edge-tools, or deal familiarly with agents more powerful than ourselves, as boys, for instance, with gunpowder: and so it is, in a moral way, with death and its adjuncts. We like to have thoughts about them, which realize them familiarly, and take off the awe of them. It is not uncommon to meet with poems on the kind of death a person would like to die, and the death-bed apparatus he would choose. Surely this is sinful. The writer knows an instance of a lady who would never join in the petition of the Litany against sudden death, as she thought sudden death a blessing rather than otherwise. It pleased Providence, in mercy possibly, rather than in chastisement, to loosen her from life by many years of lingering and singularly distressing disease. We may surely pray to die in the Catholic faith, and in outward communion, and, as the Church puts the words in our mouths, not suddenly; a petition which most likely means, that we may have