in all conscience, for it requires often a considerable degree of ingenuity to extract from them more than monosyllables.  We have been accustomed to consider the French as a restless, capricious, volatile people, and so I suppose they might have been formerly, but now they are undoubtedly the reverse, being a quiet routine plodding sort of people, particularly as regards the provincials; and even amongst the Parisians there are thousands that reside in one quarter of the city, which they seldom quit, never approaching what they consider the gay portion of Paris, but live amongst each other, visiting only within their own circle, consisting almost entirely of their relations and family connexions.  This feeling is certainly exemplified still farther at Boulogne, as I knew an old couple who lived in the upper town, which joins the lower town except by the separation of the wall of the fortifications, and had not been in the latter for five years, because they considered it was too bustling and too much a place of pleasure for such quiet, homely, and orderly folk as they professed to be and certainly were, in every sense of the word.  At Bordeaux I knew three old ladies who were born in that city, and never had been in any other town during their whole lives, nor ever desired to pass the walls of their native place.  Many persons who have been accustomed to spend their days in the provinces have a sort of horror of Paris; I remember an old gentleman at Rouen, who with his antiquated spouse lived a sort of Darby and Joan kind of life, their only daughter being married and living elsewhere; and on my once asking him if he had ever been to Paris, he replied that he was once so situated as to be compelled to go upon urgent business that rendered his presence indispensable, but that he saw very little of the place, because he had always heard that it was a city replete with vice and dissipation, and that during the few days his affairs compelled him to stay he kept close to his apartment, only quitting it to proceed to the house wherein he had to transact business, and then he went in a fiacre, as, if he had walked perhaps he might have been jostled, run over, robbed, or something unpleasant might have occurred.  “Ah! that’s very true, you did quite right, and acted very prudently, my dear,” observed his wife, “and nobody knows the anxiety I felt till you came back again.”  Although the rising generation of the French is not quite so dormant in their ideas as that which is passing, yet there is not even with them the same spirit of travel and enterprise which exist in the English.  That France has had, a reputation for restlessness, love of change, and tumult, can only be explained by stating that until the present time for the last two centuries, with the exception of Louis the Eighteenth, she has been most unfortunate in her rulers, who have been supporting a state of extravagant splendour which could alone be sustained by being wrung from the middle