port, which occupies the other fourth, and is gained by three streets parallel to each other, and leading from the “Place,” is small, but in excellent order, and always alive with shipping, and the amusing operations appertaining thereto; and the pier is a most striking object, especially at high water, when it runs out, in a straight line, for near three quarters of a mile, into the open sea.  It is true our English engineers—­who ruin hundreds of their fellow citizens by spending millions upon a bridge that nobody will take the trouble to pass over, and cutting tunnels under rivers, only to let the water into them when they have got all the money they can by the job—­would treat this pier with infinite contempt as a thing that merely answers all the purposes for which it was erected! as if that were a merit of any but the very lowest degree.  “Look at Waterloo Bridge!” they say; “we flatter ourselves that was not a thing built (like the pier of Calais) merely for use.  Nobody will say that any such thing was wanted!  But, what a noble monument of British art, and what a fine commemoration of the greatest of modern victories!” True:  but it would have been all this if you had built it on Salisbury Plain; and in that case it would have cost only half the money.  The pier of Calais is, in fact, every thing that it need be, and what perhaps no other pier is; and yet it is nothing more than a piece of serviceable carpentery, that must have cost about as much, perhaps, as to print the prospectuses of some of the late undertakings, and pay the advertisements and the lawyer’s bill.

Monthly Magazine.

* * * * *

CURIOSITY.

If I were to enumerate all the great and venerable personages who indulge in an extensive curiosity, I should never arrive at the end of my subject.  Lawyers and physicians are eternal questionists; the clergy are curious, especially on agricultural affairs; the first nobles in the land take in the “John Bull” and the “Age” to gratify the most prurient curiosity.  The gentlemen of the Stock Exchange live only from one story to another, and are miserable if a “great man’s butler looks grave,” without their knowing why.  So general indeed is this passion, that one half of every Englishman’s time is spent in inquiring after the health of his acquaintance, and the rest in asking “what news?” There is a very respectable knot of persons who go up and down the country asking people their opinion of the pope’s infallibility, and what they think of the Virgin Mary; and when they do not get an answer to their mind, they fall to shouting, “The Church is in danger,” like a parcel of lunatics.  Another set, equally respectable, are chiefly solicitous for your notions concerning the Apocalypse; and to learn whether you read your Bible at all, or whether with or without note or comment.  Then again, a third set of the