New passages have been cut from street to street, old streets have been made wider, new streets have been made, with broad sidewalks, and stately rows of houses hewn from the easily wrought cream-colored stone of the quarries of the Seine.  The sidewalks of the Boulevards, and all the public squares, wherever carriages do not pass, have been covered with this smooth asphaltic pavement, and in the Boulevards have been erected some magnificent buildings, with richly carved pilasters and other ornaments in relief, and statues in niches, and balconies supported by stone brackets wrought into bunches of foliage.  New columns and statues have been set up, and new fountains pour out their waters.  Among these is the fountain of Moliere, in the Rue Richelieu, where the effigy of the comic author, chiseled from black marble, with flowing periwig and broad-skirted coat, presides over a group of naked allegorical figures in white marble, at whose feet the water is gushing out.

In external morality also, there is some improvement; public gaming-houses no longer exist, and there are fewer of those uncleanly nuisances which offend against the code of what Addison calls the lesser morals.  The police have had orders to suppress them on the Boulevards and the public squares.  The Parisians are, however, the same gay people as ever, and as easily amused as when I saw them last.  They crowd in as great numbers to the opera and the theatres; the Boulevards, though better paved, are the same lively places; the guingettes are as thronged; the public gardens are as full of dancers.  In these, as at the New Tivoli, lately opened at Chateau Rouge in the suburbs, a broad space made smooth for the purpose is left between tents, where the young grisettes of Paris, married and unmarried, or in that equivocal state which lies somewhere between, dance on Sunday evening till midnight.

At an earlier hour on the same day, as well as on other days, at old Franconi’s Hippodrome, among the trees, just beyond the triumphal arch of Neuilly, imitations of the steeple chase, with female riders who leap over hedges, and of the ancient chariot-races with charioteers helmeted and mailed, and standing in gilt tubs on wheels, are performed in a vast amphiteatre, to a crowd that could scarcely have been contained in the Colosseum of Home.

I have heard since I came here, two or three people lamenting the physical degeneracy of the Parisians.  One of them quoted a saying from a report of Marshal Soult, that the Parisian recruits for the army of late years were neither men nor soldiers.  This seems to imply a moral as well as a physical deterioration.  “They are growing smaller and smaller in stature,” said the gentleman who made this quotation, “and it is difficult to find among them men who are of the proper height to serve as soldiers.  The principal cause no doubt is in the prevailing licentiousness.  Among that class who make the greater part of the population of Paris, the women of the finest persons