choicest treasures, as her husband was from home.  Up stairs was a parcel of mirthful boys and girls, with painting brushes in their hands, and saucers of various colours before them.  Upon enquiry, I found that they received four sous per dozen, for colouring; but I will not take upon me to say that they were over or under paid—­of so equivocal a character were their performances.  Only I hoped to be excused if I preferred the plain to the coloured.  In a foreign country, our notice is attracted towards things perhaps the most mean and minute.  With this feeling, I examined carefully what was put before me, and made a selection sufficient to shew that it was the produce of French soil.  Among the serious subjects were two to which I paid particular attention.  The one was a metrical cantique of the Prodigal Son, with six wood cuts above the text, exhibiting the leading points of the Gospel-narrative.  I will cut out and send you the second of these six:  in which you will clearly perceive the military turn which seems to prevail throughout France in things the most minute.  The Prodigal is about to mount his horse and leave his father’s house, in the cloke and cock’d hat of a French officer.

[Illustration]

The fourth of these cuts is droll enough.  It is entitled, “L’Enfant Prodigue est chasse par ses maitresses." The expulsion consists in the women driving him out of doors with besoms and hair-brooms.  It is very probable, however, that all this character of absurdity attaches to some of our own representations of the same subject; if, instead of examining (as in Pope’s time)

  ... the walls of Bedlam and Soho,

we take a survey of the graphic broadsides which dangle from strings upon the wall at Hyde Park Corner.

Another subject of a serious character, which I am about to describe to you, can rarely, in all probability, be the production of a London artist.  It is called “Notre-Dame de la bonne Delivrande,” and is necessarily confined to the religion of the country.  You have here, first of all, a reduced form of the original:  probably about one-third—­and it is the more appropriate, as it will serve to give you a very correct notion of the dressing out of the figures of the VIRGIN and CHILD which are meant to grace the altars of the chapels of the Virgin in most of the churches in Normandy.  Is it possible that one spark of devotion can be kindled by the contemplation of an object so grotesque and so absurd in the House of God?

[Illustration:  SAINTE MARIE, MERE DE DIEU, priez pour nous]

To describe all the trumpery which is immediately around it, in the original, would be a waste of time; but below are two good figures to the right, and two wretched ones to the left.  Beneath the whole, is the following accredited consoling piece of intelligence: