Nor should the EXCHANGE, in the Rue des Filles St. Thomas, be dismissed without slight notice and commendation.  It is equally simple, magnificent, and striking:  composed of a single row, or peristyle, of Corinthian pillars, flanking a square of no mean dimensions, and presenting fourteen pillars in its principal front.  At this present moment, it is not quite finished; but when completed, it promises to be among the most splendid and the most perfect specimens of public architecture in Paris.[5] Beautiful as many may think our Exchange, in my humble opinion it has no pretensions to compete with that at Paris.  The HOTEL DE VILLE, near the Place de Greve, is rather in the character of the more ancient buildings in France:  it is exceedingly picturesque, and presents a noble facade.  Being situated amidst the older streets of Paris, nothing can harmonise better with the surrounding objects.  Compared with the metropolis, on its present extended scale, it is hardly of sufficient importance for the consequence usually attached to this kind of building; but you must remember that the greater part of it was built in the sixteenth century, when the capital had scarcely attained half its present size.  The Place de Greve during the Revolution, was the spot in which the guillotine performed almost all its butcheries.  I walked over it with a hurrying step:  fancying the earth to be yet moist with the blood of so many immolated victims.  Of other HOTELS, I shall mention only those of DE SENS and DE SOUBISE.  The entrance into the former yet exhibits a most picturesque specimen of the architecture of the early part of the XVIth century.  Its interior is devoted to every thing ... which it ought not to be.  The Hotel de Soubise is still a consequential building.  It was sufficiently notorious during the reigns of Charles V. and VI.:  and it owes its present form to the enterprising spirit of Cardinal Rohan, who purchased it of the Guise family towards the end of the XVIIth century.  There is now, neither pomp nor splendour, nor revelry, within this vast building.  All its aristocratic magnificence is fled; but the antiquary and the man of curious research console themselves on its possessing treasures of a more substantial and covetable kind.  You are to know that it contains the Archives of State and the Royal Printing Office.

Paris has doubtless good reason to be proud of her public buildings; for they are numerous, splendid, and commodious; and have the extraordinary advantage over our own of not being tinted with soot and smoke.  Indeed, when one thinks of the sure invasion of every new stone or brick building in London, by these enemies of external beauty, one is almost sick at heart during the work of erection.  The lower tier of windows and columns round St. Paul’s have been covered with the dirt and smoke of upwards of a century:  and the fillagree-like embellishments which distinguish the recent restorations of Henry the VIIth’s chapel, in Westminster Abbey, are already beginning to lose their delicacy of appearance from a similar cause.  But I check myself.  I am at Paris—­and not in the metropolis of our own country.