exert his talents; and therefore it renders it the more unpardonable that he should slight one of my best customers.”  Judging, I suppose, from the expression of my countenance that I did not appear to be deeply infused with a very exalted idea of what he termed the mysteries of his art, he continued, “You may think as you please, sir, but there is much more ability required in blacking shoes than you may imagine, and that boy is well aware of it; he knows how I began by first instructing him in all the fundamental principles of the art; and gradually led him on until I accomplished him in giving the last polish, and can now proudly say he is a true artist in the profession.”

On entering a diligence once at Lyons, I found two persons in it, of very decent aspect; the one a middle aged man, the other a youth of about eighteen or nineteen; the former soon found an opportunity of informing me that he was a Parisian, but lest that should not adequately impress me with a sufficiently high idea of his importance, he added that he was chef de cuisine to the Duke of ——­, and that Monsieur, pointing to the youth opposite, was an aspirant, who had been placed under his auspices.  The young man bowed assent, and appeared most sensibly to feel the vast magnitude of the honours to which he was aspiring; but the whole was announced with such an air of solemnity and consequence, that a minister of state with his secretary would never have attempted to assume.  An Englishman under the same circumstances would have merely said, “I am head cook to the Duke of ——­ and that young man is my ’prentice.”  However, my travelling companions were overpoweringly civil, and I of course was deeply awed by finding myself in company with such elevated personages, of which they no doubt were sensible, and where we stopped for dinner they gave us the benefit of their professional talent, by entering the kitchen, giving the inmates to understand who they were, and the advantage of advice gratis, as to the arrangement of such dishes for which they were still in time to superintend; and when we sat down at the table d’hote, the chef de cuisine did not fail to inform me that he had done as much as laid in his power to ensure our having a good dinner, as my being a foreigner he was particularly anxious that France should sustain her high reputation for the culinary art in my estimation; but regretted that in the first place he arrived too late to effect much good, and indeed, had he come before it would have been but of little avail; for the provincials were such complete barbarians, that it was difficult for an enlightened person to commune with them:  that absolutely he and they appeared to be quite of another species.