Lion,' mentioned in the old memoirs, visited by Hogarth, and where,
twenty years ago, there used to be a crowd of guests. Standing in the
centre, I note a stray roysterer issuing from some long-closed _café_,
hurrying home, while the _carillons_ in their airy _rococo_-looking
tower play their melodious tunes in a wheezy jangle that is
interesting and novel. This chime has a celebrity in this quarter of
France. I stayed long in the centre of that solitary _place_,
listening to that midnight music.

It is a curious, not unromantic feeling, that of wandering about a
strange town at midnight, and the effect increases as, leaving the
_place_, I turn down a little by-street--the Rue de Guise--closed at
the end by a beautiful building or fragment, unmistakably English in
character. Behind it spreads the veil of blue sky, illuminated by the
moon, with drifting white clouds passing lazily across. This is the
entrance to the Hôtel de Guise--a gate-tower and archway, pure
Tudor-English in character, and, like many an old house in the English
counties, elegant and almost piquant in its design. The arch is
flanked by slight hexagonal _tourelles_, each capped by a pinnacle
decorated with niches in front. Within is a little courtyard, and
fragments of the building running round in the same Tudor style, but
given up to squalor and decay, evidently let out to poor lodgers.
This charming fragment excites a deep melancholy, as it is a neglected
survival, and may disappear at any moment--the French having little
interest in these English monuments, indeed, being eager to efface
them when they can. It is always striking to see this on some tranquil
night, as I do now--and Calais is oftenest seen at midnight--and think
of the Earl of Warwick, the 'deputy,' and of the English wool-staple
merchants who traded here. Here lodged Henry VIII. in 1520; and twelve
years later Francis I., when on a visit to Henry, took up his abode in