bles ?" asked I of another travelled American. "Damnable, damnable!" replied he. The fact is, the French serve up the worst and the best vegetables that grow. The dish just ordered has an amiable mirthful taste; but as for asparagus or peas, their characteristics are quite swallowed up and lost among the numerous ideas intermingled with them.

Ask now for an entrée of patisserie-a vol-au-vent à la financiere, for instance. It is a gentle delicacy, in the midst whereof you discover a cockril's comb. The word vol-au-vent typifies it exactly. It seems flying to the wind, so mild and feather-like is its course to its destination. We e may now go on, if we please, calling for any score of additional dishes. So Frenchly cooked have been those already enjoyed, that we are unburdened as before commencing. Herein is one beauty of a French meal. You are not sluggish after it, and have none of that old transatlantic, bloated, blowzy, after-dinner sensation. You are conversational, nay rather amiable; and if an enemy in the world have a favour to request, now is his moment to present himself. Happy influences these, and haply to be remembered when all other influences of foreign travel have passed away!

When a

French cookery addresses much the palate, but still more the stomach and constitution, and through them the entire man. scholar at Hofwyl is fretful or peevish, Fellenburg does not give him a chastisement, he gives him a warm bath. Fellenburg wisely knows what moral meliorations such physical agents can bring about. Diet is a tremendous agent for spiritual ends. I like to fancy society, moral, intellectual, and political, under the old image of a ship; at whose helm however, I seem to see a fat man in white apron and white-tasseled cap, with ladle in hand.

The merely physical ends of eating are threefold. There is the simple and exclusive end of gratifying those few square inches of gustative superficies denominated the Palate. This is a narrow, base and sensual end, proposed to themselves by gluttons alone. There is then the end of not only gratifying the palate, but likewise pleasing the stomach; and thus for a time diffusing throughout the frame much balmy and aromatic enjoyment. This end is certainly higher than the first-named, and lies within the daily endeavour of all gourmands. But now we come to the third and noblest end proposed to himself by none save your accomplished and philosophical epicure. This end has three constituent parts, whereof each harmonizes with the other :-the securing for your palate its largest possible quantity of present gratification, for your stomach and general frame the greatest amount of present enjoyment, and for your constitution the best materials for its permanent strength and activity. To accomplish this triply-divided and most comprehensive end is labour of deepest difficulty. Not only must good digestion wait on appetite, but health on both. What pleases the palate may much offend the stomach or the constitution; and what benefits the constitution may not be most relished by the palate, or even the stomach. The labour though difficult is not impossible; and when achieved, like all difficult labours on this earth, bears the finest fruits. In successful pursuit of this, as of a more spiritual aim, each one most be his own teacher and his own guide. The means which bless one man may curse his neighbour. Hence appears the daring quackery of those lecture-books which prescribe the same dietetic

system for all mankind ;-lengthening or shortening all mortal palates and stomachs to their one Procrustean bed! Strangely presuming lectures! striving to teach the unteachable. Let him who would not shorten his days, or to speak more properly, diminish the number of his earthly meals, beware of them.

The French have good cooking, and they know little or nothing about dyspepsia. Moreover from the highest to the lowest, they take their meals very slowly.

An omelette souffle may well precede your dessert. An omelette 'blown up a type this of the vapoury lightness in all French dishes. To the eye it presents an ample exterior. It is however but a zephyr; and with ease may be compressed into a maiden's thimble. You pronounce it stuff unsubstantial as infants' dreams. But nothing can be more delicate. The delicacy_half-musical of nightingales' tongues, served up at the banquet of a Roman epicure, might perhaps be compared with it.

For the dessert you have a choice among thirty-nine articles. This is sufficiently bewildering. Take a meringue à la crême. It wil prepare your palate for the forth-coming coffee. This beverage

however is usually sipped at some café. The Moka of the Grand Vatel is excellent. Before introducing it, the garçon deposits before you the bowls of perfumed water. After coffee, imitate the French lady opposite, and swallow a little glass of liqueur. You may however not care to disturb the agreeable impression wrought through French coffee by taking anything subsequent thereunto. Indeed dif ficulties and doubts frequently arise in determining upon the true pausing point in the courses of a Parisian dinner. I should not be surprised were you to stop at once with turbot à la crême, resolved to run no risk of annihilating, or in any manner of confusing the one-ness and tranquil delicacy of its impression. Whoever has seen Macbeth last embodied by Kemble, and other mighty spirits now passed away forever, and who has resolved not to have the memory thereof marred by witnessing another representation, will I trust appreciate this anxiety of an epicure to preserve unruf fled the mirror of his dream. It is no cheerful employment to him, if in his usual benevolence, to note among carelessly-dining friends around him, one positively pleasant gustatory impression broken in upon by others less worthy; the satisfactory completeness for instance of queue de mouton à la purée, shattered into fragments by haricots and artichauts; the music of one full finely-falling wave thus jangled, as it were, by the splash and splatter of quick-successive wavelets. If for him there be one other contemplation still less cheerful, it is perhaps the sight of those who are pretending to dine, and alas, dine not, who dwell not on separate courses of the banquet; who perform a sort of palate-service, while their hearts are far from them. No man expects to see without sending his soul to his eye, or to hear without sending it to his ear, or to meditate without sending it to his brain; and yet there are those who pretend to dine without sending it to the palate, or even to the stomach; which latter indeed by an antique Thinker was deemed its legitimate cra dle and dwelling-place. I am thoroughly convinced that from frequent neglect of such an important mission, injuriously-huge quantities are often devoured, where healthily-small portions would have sufficed; the stomach and constitution possessing quite

sufficient for their purposes, long before the palate is in anywise satisfied; the former exclaiming "hold, enough," the latter blindly shouting out" come on." I was recently dining with two friends. After soup I took my poularde en bas de soie and charlotte russee, with silent close attention. I was satisfied, and felt conscious that I had dined. My friends however continued still to call upon the garçon, and actually consumed four meat and game courses after my charlotte russee, so to speak, had squared the circle of my appetite. The explanation of their unsatisfied, still-devouring state, was in the fact that during the entire meal they had been rather warmly engaged in discussing the abstract question, whether or no the French could in strictness be called an economical people. The mind of each was of course active within his brain, instead of being where the mind of every diner should for the time reside their palates could no more notice and be gratified by the passing flavours, than the striking clock could by their ears be noticed; and when they took leave of the daine-du-comptoir, so far from being entitled to declare that they had enjoyed a dinner, they might only with propriety state, that "whereas some time ago a certain quantity of nourishment was out-side of us, that certain quantity of nourishment is now in-side of us." There was moreover for them no rememberable ground whereon gratitude might stand. I believe Dr. Franklin sometimes went so far as to aver, that five minutes after dinner he remembered not what he had been eating. Strange unphilosophic averment, one stimulator of a noble sentiment in man's nature thus quite neglected!

If you conclude to take a glass of liqueur after your coffee, take it and then call for the bill. The garçon places before you a narrow strip of paper, whereon in the manuscript of the dame-du-comptoir, you peruse the following symbolic expressions :

Though my reader has been abundantly dining with me, I, as is usually done, ordered each dish "for one only.' The garçon expects a franc. Having listened to his "mercie Monsieur," let us now bid adieu, for the present, to the renowned Restaurants of Paris.

PAPER MONEY LYRICS.

CHORUS OF BUBBLE BUYERS.

"When these practisers come to the last decoction, blow, blow; puff, puff, and all flies in fumo. Poor wretches! I rather pity their folly and indiscretion, than their loss of time and money: for these may be restored by industry: but to be a fool born is a disease incurable."-Ben Jonson's Volpone.

OH! where are the hopes we have met in a morning,
As we hustled and bustled around Capel Court?

When we laugh'd at the croakers that bade us take warning,
Who once were our scorn, and now make us their sport.
Oh! where are the regions where well-paid inspectors
Found metals omnigenous, streak'd and emboss'd ?
So kindly bought for us by honest directors,

Who charged us but three times as much as they cost.
Oh! where are the riches that bubbled like fountains,
In places we neither could utter nor spell,
A thousand miles inland mid untrodden mountains,
Where silver and gold grew like heath and blue-bell?
Oh! where are the lakes overflowing with treasure?
The gold-dust that roll'd in each torrent and stream?
The mines that held water by cubic-mile measure,
So easily pump'd up by portable steam?

That water our prospects a damp could not throw on,
We had only a million-horse power to prepare,
Make a thousand-mile road for the engine to go on,
And send coals from Newcastle to boil it when there.
Oh! where are the bridges to span the Atlantic ?
Oh! where is the gas to illumine the poles?
They came to our visions-that makes us half frantic :
They came to our pockets; that touches our souls.

Oh! there is the seat of most exquisite feeling:
The first pair of nerves to the pocket doth dive:
A wound in our hearts would be no time in healing,
But a wound in our pockets how can we survive?
Now curst be the projects, and curst the projectors,
And curst be the bubbles before us that roll'd,
Which bursting have left us like desolate spectres,
Bewailing our bodies of paper and gold.

For what is a man but his coat and his breeches,
His plate and his linen, his land and his house?

Oh! we had been men had we won our mock riches;
But now we are ghosts, each as poor as a mouse.

But shades as we are, we, with shadowy bubbles,

When the midnight bell tolls will through Capel Court glide,
And the dream of the Jew shall be turmoils and troubles,
When he sees each pale ghost on its bubble astride.

And the lecturing Scots that upheld the delusion,
By prating of paper, and wealth, and free trade,
Shall see us by night to their awe and confusion,
Grim phantoms of wrath that shall never be laid.

HER MAJESTY'S PORTRAITS.—THE GREAT STATE SECRET.

TORIES and Whigs some time since made a great fuss about ministers dining so often with the Queen. We say nothing of the laudable pride, pomp, and jealousy occasioned by the circumstance. We have only to remark that among the innumerable conjectures of every shade of improbability to which it gave rise, there was not one that bordered upon a half-tint of truth. The present paper is devoted to an elucidation of the state secret.

George III. was accustomed to see Mr. Pitt on state affairs at the early and cool-headed hour of six in the morning. The fourth George, loving the more mature and mellow counsel of pausingtime, generally spared an hour after dinner on one day of the week -namely, Wednesday-to enter into those deep conferences with his ministers so necessary to the safe continuance of our political, social and moral existence and the hours appropriated by his late nautical majesty to the examination of the state-chart and log-book ap. proached nearer to those of his daybreak-loving sire. "But her present Majesty," ejaculated the more intemperate members of the opposition," her present Majesty holds counsel with her ministers every day at dinner! They dine there-at Buckingham Palace! They are commanded thither for the express purpose-and they eat! Full of royal cupboard-love, they go sponging upon her august board every day; and talk with their mouths full of all sorts of men and measures. It is unprecedented; nay worse, if it forms a precedent for the future, and a very bad one, we must humbly venture to think. With equal loyalty and humility we moreover solicit permission to ask, what in the name of grace will her Majesty be pleased to do next? These were junior members, and could not keep their temper in the face of a fact so savoury to their opponents. The green-eyed monster issued from every tureen of royal turtle which their seething imaginations saw placed before their rivals; and albeit, they were far too generous and possessed too much statesmanlike magnanimity to express a public wish that the callipash might choke their eloquence, they most fervently prayed in private that a similar effect might be produced by the callipee. "Strange that such difference should be," &c. The elder members of the opposition_smiled in silent superiority. They did not understand why the Lords Melbourne, Russel, Palmerston, and Glenelg should dine so frequently upon state-affairs; but they felt it undignified to notice such things.

Now however there is an end of all concealment. We are permitted to divulge the secret, and our anxious friends shall presently be shown what deep and important reason has been hidden in the breast of the Premier, which no taunts and misrepresentations could for a moment make him dream of bringing to light. The mystery is now about to be unfolded; the elaborate design to become apparent; the cause of those secret cabinet councils, of the numerous couriers, messages, letters, portfolios, embroidered silk and morocco cases, which have created so much surprise, so many opinions and fancies, and so much uneasiness, is about to be made public. The result will show that the daily banquets eaten by the noble