“Boulogne-sur-Mer, France, December 29, 1829. This morning at ten o’clock, after our tedious detention, we embarked from Dover in a steamer for this place instead of Calais.  I mentioned the steamer, but, cousin, if you have formed any idea of elegance, or comfort, or speed in connection with the name of steamer from seeing our fine steamboats, and have imagined that English or French boats are superior to ours, you may as well be undeceived.  I know of no description of packet-boats in our waters bad enough to convey the idea.  They are small, black, dirty, confined things, which would be suffered to rot at the wharves for want of the least custom from the lowest in our country.  You may judge of the extent of the accommodations when I tell you that there is in them but one cabin, six feet six inches high, fourteen feet long, eleven feet wide, containing eight berths.

“Our passage was, fortunately, short, and we arrived in the dominions of ‘His Most Christian Majesty’ Charles X at five o’clock.  The transition from a country where one’s own language is spoken to one where the accents are strange; from a country where the manners and habits are somewhat allied to our own to one where everything is different, even to the most trifling article of dress, is very striking on landing after so short an interval from England to France.

“The pier-head at our landing was filled with human beings in strange costume, from the grey surtout and belt of the gendarmes to the broad twilled and curiously plaited caps of the masculine women; which latter beings, by the way, are the licensed porters of baggage to the custom-house.”

“Paris, January 7, 1830. Here have I been in this great capital of the Continent since the first day of the year.  I shall remember my first visit to Paris from the circumstance that, at the dawn of the day of the new year, we passed the Porte Saint-Denis into the narrow and dirty streets of the great metropolis.

“The Louvre was the first object we visited.  Our passports obtained us ready admittance, and, although our fingers and feet were almost frozen, we yet lingered three hours in the grand gallery of pictures.  Indeed, it is a long walk simply to pass up and down the long hall, the end of which from the opposite end is scarcely visible, but is lost in the mist of distance.  On the walls are twelve hundred and fifty of some of the chefs d’oeuvre of painting.  Here I have marked out several which I shall copy on my return from Italy.

“I have my residence at present at the Hotel de Lille, which is situated very conveniently in the midst of all the most interesting objects of curiosity to a stranger in Paris,—­the palace of the Tuileries, the Palais Royal, the Bibliotheque Royale, or Royal Library, and numerous other places, all within a few paces of us.  On New Year’s Day the equipages of the nobility and foreign ambassadors, etc., who paid their respects to the King and the Duke of Orleans, made considerable display in the Place du Carrousel and in the court of the Tuileries.