do learn, and information to a certain point is general.  Those who have knowledge are not shy of imparting it, and those who are ignorant take care not to seem so; but are sometimes agreeable, often amusing, and seldom betes.  Nowhere have I seen unformed sheepish boys, nowhere the surliness, awkwardness, ungraciousness, and uneasy proud bashfulness, I have seen in the best companies in England.  Our French friend Lucien has, at fifteen, the air and conversation of a finished gentleman; and our English friend C——­ is at eighteen, the veriest log of a lumpish school-boy that ever entered a room.  What I have seen of society, I like:  the delicious climate too, the rich skies, the clear elastic atmosphere, the out of doors life the people lead, are all (in summer at least) delightful.  There may be less comfort here; but nobody feels the want of it; and there is certainly more amusement—­and amusement is here truly “le supreme bonheur.”  Happiness, according to the French meaning of the word, lies more on the surface of life:  it is a sort of happiness which is cheap and ever at hand.  This is the place to live in for the merry poor man, or the melancholy rich one:  for those who have too much money, and those who have too little; for those who only wish, like the Irishman “to live all the days of their life,”—­prendre en legere monnaie la somme des plaisirs:  but to the thinking, the feeling, the domestic man, who only exists, enjoys, suffers through his affections—­

    “Who is retired as noontide dew,
    Or fountain in a noonday grove—­”

to such a one, Paris must be nothing better than a vast frippery shop, an ever-varying galantee show, an eternal vanity fair, a vortex of folly, a pandemonium of vice.

September 18.—­Our imperials are packed, our passports signed, and we set off to-morrow for Geneva by Dijon and the Jura.  I leave nothing behind me to regret, I see nothing before me to fear, and have no hope but in change; and now all that remains to be said of Paris, and all its wonders and all its vanities, all its glories and all its gaieties, are they not recorded in the ponderous chronicles of most veracious tourists, and what can I add thereto?

Geneva, Saturday Night, 11 o’clock.—­Can it be the “blue rushing of the arrowy Rhone” I hear from my window?  Shall I hear it to-morrow, when I wake?  Have I seen, have I felt the reality of what I have so often imagined? and much, much more?  How little do I feel the contretemps and privations which affect others—­and feel them only because they affect others!  To me they are nothing:  I have in a few hours stored my mind with images of beauty and grandeur which will last through my whole existence.

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