Did drink, or opium, send thee? or old age
And barter'd youth? or very hate and rage?
Didst plunge for blood, out of thy very fright,
Like the poor moth that seeks the candle-light?
Or wert thou indeed a wildfire and a tool
In the dark hands of some as senseless fool,
Who hoped the fear, if not the fact, might slay
A blossom, growing in a bigot's way?
Whate'er thy monstrous origin, be known
This truth, that mad and violent are one :-

For oh! - and hear it, all you fops that babble
Of blood and force, you "high" or you "low" rabble,
As surely as this poor mad soul had made
A brutal king, had empire been his trade,

So surely, born in drugget, had the king
Been as vain, vulgar, and accurs'd a thing;
Albeit he aspired, from drunken scenes

In taps and booths, to drink the blood of queens.
Send both, ye gods, wherever they appear,
To some still jail, some safe, yet busy sphere,
Where use may comfort what restraint began,
Till man himself blush for one misborn man.

But thou, dear lady, brave good heart, glad face,
Fit to be mother of a happy race,

Make peril shame to harm thee; as thou must,
With thy bright bearing and delightful trust;
And meet thou still the time. Be still the queen
Of peace, and promise, and all growth serene
Of wisdom, and the soft sweet force of right,
As walls by flowers are pierc'd with gentlest might;
Till some great day, help'd by thy happy race,
This earth, which also holds etherial place,
And is a globe in heav'n, this yet crude earth,

Show men and angels what its orb is worth;

And, like a perfect fruit, hang on the tree
Of ever-blooming, starry eternity.

LEIGH HUNT.

LETTERS FROM THE CONTINENT.

BY A FELLOW OF ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE.

PARIS-FIRST

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IMPRESSIONS APPEARANCE OF THE PEOPLE MILITARY -POLITICAL SYSTEM-MONARCHY OF THE MIDDLE CLASSES-STABILITY OF THE ORLEANS DYNASTYDECLINE OF THE MILITARY MANIA CHEAP LIVING ARCHITECTURE-THEATRE FRANÇAIS-FRENCH LITERATURE-SPIRIT OF THE PRESENT TIME-SPANISH GALLERY MURILLO REVOLUTION OF 1830.

DEAR M

Paris, March, 1839.

When we parted on board the Boulogne steamer-I to explore new regions in search of health and amusement—you to return to the dust and cobwebs of Lincoln's Inn, I promised to do all in my power to alleviate the monotony of your learned leisure, by writing to you frequently, and keeping notes of all I saw worthy of remark in foreign lands for your amusement and edification. I have not forgotten my promise; and having now a few leisure moments for the first time since I arrived in Paris, I sit down to write you a few observations on what I have seen since I left England. In the first place, however, I must tell you, what I know you will be glad to hear, that the fatigue of travelling, and the excitement of seeing new sights, have, as I always predicted they would, done me more good than all the doctors and medicine in the world; and I am already so much better as to be able to walk about, see sights, dine at table d'hôtes, and go to plays and concerts in the evening.

The journey from Boulogne here over the wide tree-less plains of Picardy, is as uninteresting as can well be conceived. The absence of the green fields and hedge rows to which the eye is accustomed in England, and the want of country seats and farm houses, scattered over the face of the country, give it a bare, uncomfortable appearance. The population here, as indeed generally throughout the Continent, live almost entirely concentrated in towns and villages. Not enjoying the same security as in England, whose happy soil no hostile armies ever invade, they have not ventured to spread themselves over the country, and have flocked together for mutual protection. Independently of the other disadvantages which must result from this concentration of the population in particular spots, it must occasion a great loss of time in agricultural labour, the peasants having often as far as three or four miles to go to their work.

The towns and villages through which we pass appear slovenly and unfinished, after the neatness and cleanliness of England; but there are no signs of poverty. On the contrary, things have a thriving, substantial appearance: new houses are building in every direction; and the people seem well fed and comfortably clothed. There is no waste land; the country is all cultivated, and almost all under the plough; the fields are generally large; and unless in the immediate vicinity of some villages, I saw no trace of garden cultivation, or of the excessive subdivision of landed property, which the law of equal succession among the children is said to have brought about.

Paris seems as if it had dropped from the air into the midst of the surrounding country. As you approach it, you see no signs of the vicinity of a large city; no long lines of suburbs, as in London, running far out into the country; no crowd of carriages and carts, no stir of people; up to the

very barriers all is as silent and solitary as if it was a hundred miles from any town. All at once, and without any preparation, you find yourself in the midst of a brilliant capital, gay, splendid, and picturesque beyond any thing which can be conceived by those who have formed their ideas of a great city from dull, dingy, smoky London. The stranger on entering Paris hardly knows what to admire most, the magnificence of the public buildings, the architectural beauty of the churches and palaces, the spacious quays, the splendid and stately gardens, or the brilliant shops and cafes, the lively picturesque streets, the gay Boulevards, and the swarm of welldressed, well-behaved, intelligent population. I was in Paris for a few days about ten years ago; but since that period improvement has been going on so rapidly I should hardly have recognised it as the same place. It is incredible how much has been done since the Revolution of 1830, and the establishment of the Orleans dynasty on the throne. The finest architectural ornaments of the city have been erected or completed; streets widened and new paved; old houses pulled down, and new and splendid ones built in every direction; foot pavements laid down; galleries and museums opened to the public; and, what is of more consequence than all, want and beggary have disappeared; and the entire population, down to the very lowest classes, have an air of comfort and independence. When I was last in Paris, the streets swarmed with beggars; now not a beggar is to be seen. Literally, I have only been asked for charity once since I landed in France, and that was by an old blind man. Nor does this disappearance of mendicancy seem to be the result merely of police regulations, for I see absolutely no signs of want or destitution. Policemen may prevent people from begging, but they cannot prevent them from looking cold and hungry and wretched if they really are so. Now I see nothing of the sort in the streets of Paris; and yet my researches have not been confined to the Palais Royal, the Garden of the Tuileries, and what may be called the West End. I have dived into the labyrinth of old-fashioned narrow streets in the centre of the city, the seat of every insurrection, and therefore, I presume, the principal abode of the working classes. I have traversed the Faubourg St. Antoine, the strong-hold of the Jacobins in the first Revolution; I have walked at all hours along the Boulevards, the great thoroughfare of the city, and the favourite lounge of the idle population; and every where I have been struck by the same fact the comfortable condition of the people, and the total absence of those wretched objects of vice and misery whom we meet at every step in the streets of London and our large manufacturing towns. It struck me also that the working classes here have not the same anxious, careworn look, nor the same sallow, squalid, unhealthy appearance which we are accustomed to see among the artisans and labourers of our large towns. They look as if they had more amusement, more opportunities of enjoying life, and less suffering from overwork, confinement, and anxiety. The respectable citizens also appear to have more time for amusement than with us. The street passengers do not hurry along with an air of resolute, business-like determination, as in London; but stop often to look at book stalls or print shops, to listen to itinerant musicians, or to chat for a few minutes with an acquaintance.

The superior condition of the lower classes is owing, no doubt, in a great degree to the comparative absence of drunkenness. There may be a good deal of merry-making over cheap wine outside the barrier, among the Parisian operatives on a Sunday or holyday, but drunkenness, brutal, degrading, and habitual drunkenness, the besetting vice of our lower orders, would appear to be almost unknown. I have not, since I entered France,

seen a single person in a state of intoxication. We are apt in England to give ourselves airs, and speak with affected horror of French infidelity and immorality; we should do well to look to our own gin palaces, and the condition of the lower classes in our great towns, before we thank God that we are not like our neighbours, publicans and sinners.

One of the first things which strikes an Englishman, on arriving in Paris, is the great display of military force. The red trousers and worsted epaulettes of the soldiers of the line meet him at every turn. The men are undersized, compared to our British troops, but are generally stout, sturdy, thick-set little fellows, heavy and clownish, however, in their appearance, and with no trace of the smartness and intelligence which distinguish, or used to distinguish, the French militaire. On the contrary, I think I never saw a set of men whose countenances betokened such hopeless and vacant stupidity as these French common soldiers. It is clear, from the contrast between their appearance and that of the lowest class of workmen and artisans to be seen in the streets of Paris, that education and intelligence are as yet very much confined to the capital and large towns, and not generally diffused throughout the provinces. I believe, however, that the inferior appearance of the common soldiers may partly be accounted for, from the fact that the practice of purchasing substitutes for military service is becoming very general in France. As the country is growing rich, and the attention of the upper and middle classes more and more diverted every day from the dazzling prospects of military glory to the peaceful pursuits of industry, the respectable classes are no longer willing to serve as common soldiers when drawn by the conscription, and their places are supplied by hired substitutes, drawn, of course, from the very poorest and lowest classes of society. I am confirmed in this opinion by the multitude of advertisements which I see posted up in every direction, of Mutual Assurance Societies, against the risk of being drawn by the conscription. The price paid for a substitute for the period of seven years' service affords no bad criterion of the flourishing condition of the middle classes in France, and of the decline among them of the military mania. The sum commonly paid varies, I am told, from 607. to 80%.

The discipline of the French troops appears extremely loose; the men have evidently very little drilling, and want altogether the martial, erect bearing of the English soldier; and their manoeuvres are gone through in a slovenly manner, which would not be tolerated in any other service. I saw a regiment turning the corner of a street, the other day, and the confusion among them was quite ludicrous; they had more the appearance of a rabble of disorderly schoolboys, than of a body of organised and disciplined soldiers. The experience of the last war has proved, however, that the importance of the strict martial discipline of the old German school has been vastly over-rated, and, in the case of French soldiers at any rate, may be safely dispensed with.

With the exception, however, of the common soldiers of the line, the lower classes have almost universally a smart, intelligent look, and a degree of polish and refinement in their manners and intercourse with each other, which we should look for in vain in the same rank of life in England. French politeness is proverbial; and although it is said, and I believe truly, that the extreme and artificial refinement which characterised the higher circles of French society has been swept away, along with so many things of greater importance, by the storms of the Revolution, it is certain that the decencies and humanities of civilised society are diffused over a much wider surface in France than elsewhere. Whatever may be the vices of the lower orders

in France, they are free from coarseness and brutality, and in their intercourse with one another preserve the appearance, at least, of amiability and good nature. It would be wrong, perhaps, to attach much importance to this mere outward, superficial refinement, which, as we have frequently seen, may co-exist with inward depravity and corruption; and yet, as a matter of taste, it is certainly better that the scavenger should take off his hat to the dustman than damn his eyes. The habit also of treating one another, and being treated, with courtesy and politeness, must contribute to support the feeling of self-respect which is the main-spring of all improvement among the lower classes.

The French are commonly considered a more gay, mercurial race than the English, and so they are in one sense, namely, that they are more fond of amusement and more easily amused. But their gaiety is by no means of a lively, uproarious kind. Among the crowds who throng the Boulevards, the Gardens of the Tuileries, and the Champs Elysées, in search of amusement, I observe no fun or frolic going on, no larking and practical jokes, such as we see in Greenwich Park of a Sunday, or wherever the Londoners go a pleasuring. The Cockney is, on the whole, a more voracious animal than the Parisian; indeed I am often quite astonished at the extreme order and decorum of a Parisian mob. Last Sunday I followed the crowd into the Tuileries, where the museums are thrown open to the public on that day. The great Picture Gallery was closed on account of preparations making for an exhibition of the works of modern French artists, but the Gallery of Spanish Paintings and a museum full of drawings and engravings, models of naval architecture, and other curiosities, were filled completely with a dense crowd of working men, common soldiers, national guardsmen, citizens with their wives and families, and people of the middle and lower classes, wedged together so closely, that it was scarcely possible to move, and yet no pushing or quarelling, no scolding or swearing, such as we see among our aristocratic mobs at the pit door of the Opera, but all behaving with the most perfect order, propriety, and decorum. To judge from the number of people who throng to see the public galleries every Sunday, and also from the abundance of excellent print shops, the Parisian public must be imbued with a considerable taste for the fine arts. Music also appears in great demand, and music of a very superior description. The walls are covered with programmes of cheap concerts, where for a franc or two the symphonies of Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart, and other classical pieces of the highest class, may be heard.

There is a much greater mixture of the different ranks and classes of society here than in England. It is impossible to stir a step without being practically reminded that you are in a land where equality is the order of the day: an Englishman is astonished to find, on leaving his native land, how the social distinctions and gradations which he has been accustomed to see so strongly marked and clearly defined gradually melt away and disappear; how the gentleman becomes less gentlemanlike, and the shopkeeper more so, till the distinction between them is almost lost. It is evident the middle classes in Paris feel their own importance; they feel that they are the ruling class; that the government is one of their making, and rests on them for support, and they are proportionally elevated in their own opinion. The political condition of France is but little understood in England. It is so different from anything we are accustomed to at home, that we have great difficulty in bringing our minds to understand it; and judging it by our own maxims and preconceived opinions, we fall into the strangest errors. According to one, France is almost a pure democracy; according to another, she is little better than a despotism: the truth is, she is neither one nor the