When Palais Royal vice subsides,[11]
    (Who plays there’s a complete ass—­)
  When footpaths grow on highway sides[12]—­
    Then! then’s the Aurea-Aetas!

  There, France, I leave thee.—­Jean Taureau![13]
    What think’st thou of thy neighbours? 
  Or (what I own I’d rather know)
    What—­think’st thou of MY LABOURS?

A TRAVELLER OF 1827, (W.  P.)

Carshalton.

    [2] “Which, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length
    along”—­POPE.

[3] It is, indeed, difficult to avoid one, call it what you will, and quite as difficult to find a more absurd name than that adopted, unless, indeed, (why the machine goes but five miles an hour,) it is called a diligence from not being diligent, as the speaker of our House of Commons may be so designated from not speaking.  It consists of three bodies, carries eighteen inside, and is not unfrequently drawn by nine horses.  A cavalry charge, therefore, could scarcely make more noise.  Hence, and from the other circumstance, its association in the second stanza with the triune sonorous Cerberus.  A diligence indeed!

    [4] The intrusive garrulity of French waiters at dinner is
    notorious.

[5] This “sea Mediterranean” is a most filthy, fetid, uncovered gutter, running down the middle of the most, even of the best streets, and with which every merciless Jehu most liberally bespatters the unhappy pedestrian.  Truly la belle nation has little idea of decency, or there would be subterranean sewers like ours.

    [6] French houses are cleaner even than ours externally, being
    all neatly whitewashed! mais le dedans! le dedans!

    [7] The servants are as notorious for their incivility as for
    their intrusive loquacity.

    [8] As Scott well observes in the introduction to Waverley, “the
    word comfortable is peculiar to the English language.”  The thing
    is certainly peculiar to us, if the word is not.

[9] All the tragedies are in rhyme, and that of the very worst description for elocutionary effect.  It is the anapestic, like, as Hannah More remarks, “A cobbler there was, and he lived in a stall!”

    [10] It is scarcely necessary to remark, that the absurdity
    (exploded in England at the Reformation) of a Latin liturgy
    still obtains in France.

[11] The Palais Royal! that pandemonium of profligacy! whose gaming tables have eternally ruined so many of our countrymen!  So many, that he who, unwarned by their sad experience, plays at them, is—­is he not?—­“complete ass.”

    [12] There are none, even in the leading streets; our
    ambassador’s, for instance.

[13] As the Etoile lately translated John Bull.  “When John’s no longer chamber-maid.”  Of the propria quae maribus of French domestic economy, this is not the least amusing feature.  At my hotel (in Rue St. Honore) there was a he bed-maker; and I do believe the anomalous animal is not uncommon.

        “When printed well a book is.”