of ages, the patroness of Paris. The shrine was to have been placed immediately under the centre of the superb and highly ornamented dome, that rises to the height of 305 feet above the pavement, the faithful might then, from all quarters of the church, have had easy access to the remains of this holy maiden, to whose particular intercession in heaven, it was supposed, the inhabitants of Paris owed whatever they had enjoyed of happiness and prosperity. It was customary upon some great occasion, as when rain was required for the fruits of the earth, of when there was too much rain, to carry this revered shrine in procession, and it was then adorned with every thing valuable that the company of jewellers could furnish. Twenty persons dressed in white, and with naked feet, were the bearers, and St. Marcel himself was brought from a neighbouring church by his votaries, to join in the procession; but Mad. de Sevigné will give you the best account of this solemnity, and will tell you that it required ten more men at least to carry each of the saints home again, when their shrines had once approached within a short distance of each other. They had been acquainted in this world some centuries ago, and had retained an inclination for each other's company ever since. From this outrageous degree of nonsense the mind of the Parisian passed, as might have been expected, during the ferment of the Revolution, to the opposite extreme. What became of the gallant St. Marcel, I know not, but the shrine of St. Genevieve was ransacked, and her remains, after having been treated with every species of insult, were conveyed to the place de Grêve, and burnt by the executioner. The church, now become the Pantheon, is a very handsome edifice, and is intended, it is said, to receive the remains of those illustrious men, who do honour to their country by their writings, and their exploits in war. The remains of Mirabeau had been deposited there, but they were removed on the discovery of a correspondence which he had carried on with the court, as were those of Marat, after the fall of Jacobinism; and in order to avoid such inconsistencies hereafter, it is now understood that no one, how. ever distinguished, can be interred in the Pantheon, until ten years shall have rolled away after his death. The tombs of Rousseau and of Voltaire are, as yet, the only monuments to be seen

there, and as these have been placed on a lower floor below the pavement, they appear to very little advantage, and do no credit to the intention of the government. I am surprised that none of the wits of Paris should have imagined a conversation in the nature of Lord Lyttleton's dialogues of the dead, between these two great authors, as they remain here, side by side, during the long and tedious nights of winter; they might each very properly allow that a fair experiment had been made of their principles in matters of religion and politics; that all power had been for a time concentrated in, and exercised by, the people, and Christianity driven out from among Frenchmen; and that the result had been fatal to good government, and to every sort of morality-to the arts and sciences, and to all the decencies of common life. A noble prospect of all Paris is commanded from the top of the Pantheon, and as I foresee that the objects I have yet to speak of may occupy several letters, I will avail myself of the situation, and conduct you, in imagination, to the upper gallery, whence we may cast a rapid glance over the greater part of Paris. The city, divided into nearly two equal portions by the river is at our feet, and the circular line of barriers at the outlet of every street which communicates with the country, shows how the inhabitants of this great metropolis are shut in whenever their master pleases, as sheep are by a butcher. A good map, and some previous knowledge of the city, enables one easily to point out the different churches, hospitals, and palaces, and to distinguish the military school, where the present Emperor received his education, at the expense of the late King; the Hotel of the Invalids, and the Champ de Mars. It was on this fatal spot, that Louis XVI accepted of a Constitution which was his destruction; it was here that Bailley, one of the most humane and enlightened men of the age, drank to the very lees the cup of human misery-and it was here, that the representatives of the nation could for six years successively, swear eternal hatred to that form of government to which they have since sworn allegiance. The Hotel of the Invalids is particularly conspicuous, and the more to our satisfaction, from our knowing that two or three hundred officers, and from three to four thousand soldiers, are comfortably accommodated there for the rest of their lives. You will see a description of this great and magnificent building in any book of travels into France, and particularly of the dome;

which, though superb in execution, was a very useless and costly addition to so charitable an establishment. Several hundred standards, taken in war, are here displayed in a very graceful manner. I saw three or four English among them, but what surprised me was a jack and ensign of the American navy; I think our ambassador might be directed to inquire upon what occasion they were taken, for no such event was ever, I believe, known in America. I observed among the standards, that those of Russia and of the German powers were dark and gloomy and torn with bullets, those of Italy were gaudy and for the most part entire, and those of Turkey were singular with a certain semi-barbarian air, which is not unbecoming. The kitchen of the hotel is a dark and gloomy cavern, where Polyphemus might have stretched himself at full length, after having supped on two of the companions of Ulysses, and it seemed every way worthy of such a master; but the library made us amends-it is a light and handsome room, where an excellent collection of books is provided for the use of the pensioners, and where I had the pleasure to see several of them reading at a very convenient circular table, while others were looking over maps, or taking notes. At the upper end of the room is a picture of Buonaparte, when first con. sul, by his favourite painter, David, in which, though I have heard it much commended, I could see but very little merit. He is represented as on horseback, at the moment of passing the St. Bernard. But no horse, of such horses, to use the language of Homer, as are born in these degenerate days, could possibly gallop in such a place, nor could any man keep his seat in such a position-the whole composition, in short, is defective. I would have seated him on one of those blocks of granite, which lie scattered over the surface of the little plain of St. Bernard, and were probably brought there by some great convulsion of nature; and I would have expressed in his countenance the pleasure which a great conqueror might be supposed to feel, at beholding his army file off before him, after a successful struggle with difficulties which, to the rest of mankind, had appeared insurmountable. I would have made him smile with complacency, for I am told he has been seen to smile, and I would have rendered the whole picture as pleasing a representation as possible of the most brilliant event in the life of this great man. But David has given him a dark and gloomy air; and, were it not for the insignia of command, one

would suppose it the portrait of some officer of captain Rolando's, who, after assassinating a traveller, was endeavouring to escape, at the risk of his neck, from the pursuit of the holy brotherhood. Between the Luxembourg, the Invalids, and the river, is the Fauxbourg St. Germain, where the greater part of the principal nobility resided at the time of the royal government. Their hotels are in general at the extremity of a court, separated from the street by high walls, and with spacious gardens behind. A great number of these have been sold as national property, and are converted into lumber houses or stores; for the new rich, who might alone apply such buildings to their former purposes, choose to be in the busier part of Paris, and nearer the Thullieries; but some are yet in possession of the rightful proprietor, and I am told that the best company, in the proper sense of the word, is still to be met with in the Fauxbourg St. Germain. Some few persons of noble birth who had originally taken a part in the Revolution, have been since carried along by the torrent, and now fill offices in the government, or about the person of the emperor; they are not many in number however, and it has not been without threats of banishment and confiscation to them, and all their connexions, that a few ladies of ancient name have been prevailed upon to stand upon the list of attendants on the empress. On visiting a cotton manufactory, I was surprised to find a Monsieur de Montmorency, and some other noblemen, of ancient and illustrious fa mily also, among the directors of it; the Duke de Liancourt, whose travels in America have been published, has converted the castle of his ancestors into a similar establishment; he confines himself to a small corner, which serves for every purpose of housekeeping, and has been heard to declare that he never before knew what happiness was: I have, upon two or three occasions, found myself in the company of this ancient nobility, and have been struck with their cheerful acquiescence to the will of fortune, and at that dignified politeness of demeanor, which does not exist elsewhere. Immediately below us, for I must still suppose you in the gallery of the Pantheon, is the quarter once called the University, from being chiefly the property of that ancient body which had been erected into a corporation by the earlier kings of France, and was in possession of very extensive municipal rights. The two inhabited islands of the river are before you on the north; that of the city, which has the palace of Justice at one

extremity, and the church of Notre Dame near the other, is a collection of narrow dirty streets, and dark houses, of I know not how many stories, and that of St. Louis consists of regular streets which cross each other at right angles; it was formerly the resi. dence of people of the robe (as lawyers and judges are called in French), and has now the appearance of one of our towns in America at the time of the yellow fever. To the east and south-east of the Pantheon are the Fauxbourgs St. Victor and St. Marceau, remarkable for having furnished, during the whole of the revolu tion, a crowd of needy and desperate individuals, whom the different parties have used as instruments against each other; and remarkable also for manners and customs, extremely remote from those of the brilliant parts of Paris. I should like, before we quitted the Pantheon, to give you some idea of that noble building, the purposes of which may be changed a great many times yet before it can be completely finished. It is in the best style of architecture, with a front composed of twenty-two Corinthian columns fifty-eight feet in height; fifty-two others of smaller dimensions surround the exterior of the dome; the interior of the building consists of four naves, decorated with one hundred and thirty Corinthian columns, and in the centre of these is the dome, which presents sixteen others, that support a spherical roof, from which rises a second and more elevated vault. It would, if finished, be such as you might suppose the Temple of Fame, in Roman or in Grecian times; and the present intention is, that the whole shall be surmounted by a colossal statue of the goddess, with all her attributes. From the Pantheon we will go to the Gobelins, which have been so frequently and so well described, and then to the ancient church of St. Medard. There is no art perhaps, in which the first rude essays are more remote from subsequent perfection than that of tapestry. The veteran of the fish-market, with a face marked by bruises, and in all the glow of habitual intemperance, is not more removed in appear. ance from the elegante, who shivers at a breeze, than the hangings we sometimes meet with under the name of tapestry, are from the production of the Gobelins. Their performance is always a copy from some picture, and their mode of working resembles weaving rather than embroidery; the threads are perpendicular-these they intermingle in all the infinite variety of colours that the subject requires, working on the wrong side,