reluctance by turning quickly about; so that it required some dexterity to apply the extinguishers.  At the commencement of the mass, two of the angels by the side of the Almighty descended to the foot of the altar, and, placing themselves by the tomb, in which a pasteboard figure of the Virgin had been substituted for her living representative, gently raised it to the feet of the Father.  The image, as it mounted, from time to time lifted its head and extended its arms, as if conscious of the approaching beatitude, then, after having received the benediction and been encircled by another angel with a crown of glory, it gradually disappeared behind the clouds.  At this instant a buffoon, who all the time had been playing his antics below, burst into an extravagant fit of joy; at one moment clapping his hands most violently, at the next stretching himself out as if dead.  Finally, he ran up to the feet of the old man, and hid himself under his legs, so as to shew only his head.  The people called him Grimaldi, an appellation that appears to have belonged to him by usage, and it is a singular coincidence that the surname of the noblest family of Genoa the Proud, thus assigned by the rude rabble of a sea-port to their buffoon, should belong of right to the sire and son, whose mops and mowes afford pastime to the upper gallery at Covent-Garden.

Thus did the pageant proceed in all its grotesque glory, and, while—­

    “These labor’d nothings in so strange a style
     Amazed the unlearned, and made the learned smile,”

the children shouted aloud for their favorite Grimaldi; the priests, accompanied with bells, trumpets, and organs, thundered out the mass; the pious were loud in their exclamations of rapture at the devotion of the Virgin; and the whole church was filled with “un non so che di rauco ed indistinto".—­But I have told you enough of this foolish story, of which it were well if the folly had been the worst.  The sequel was in the same taste and style, and ended with the euthanasia of all similar representations, a hearty dinner.

Footnotes: 

[4] Description de la Haute Normandie, I. p. 130.

[5] Histoire de Dieppe, II. p. 86.

[6] Essals sur le Departement de la Seine Inferieure, I. p. 119.

[7] Histoire de Dieppe, I. p. 1.

[8] Another author, mentioned by the Abbe Fontenu, in the Memoires de l’Academie des Inscriptions, X. p. 413, carries the antiquity of the place still eight centuries higher, representing it as the Portus Ictius, whence Julius Caesar sailed for Britain.

[9] Description de la Haute Normandie, I. p. 125.

[10] Vol.  XI. p. 55.