an appearance, was, as it were, focussed in its capital. Mr.
Coxe, who visited Warsaw not long before Nicholas Chopin's
arrival there, says:--

The streets are spacious, but ill-paved; the churches and
public buildings large and magnificent, the palaces of the
nobility are numerous and splendid; but the greatest part of
the houses, especially the suburbs, are mean and ill-
constructed wooden hovels.

What, however, struck a stranger most, was the throngs of
humanity that enlivened the streets and squares of Warsaw, the
capital of a nation composed of a medley of Poles, Lithuanians,
Red and White Russians, Germans, Muscovites, Jews, and
Wallachians, and the residence of a numerous temporary and
permanent foreign population. How our friend from quiet Nancy--
which long ago had been deserted by royalty and its train, and
where literary luminaries, such as Voltaire, Madame du Chatelet,
Saint Lambert, &c., had ceased to make their fitful appearances--
must have opened his eyes when this varied spectacle unfolded
itself before him.

The streets of stately breadth, formed of palaces in the
finest Italian taste and wooden huts which at every moment
threatened to tumble down on the heads of the inmates; in
these buildings Asiatic pomp and Greenland dirtin strange
union, an ever-bustling population, forming, like a
masked procession, the most striking contrasts. Long-bearded
Jews, and monks in all kinds of habits; nuns of the strictest
discipline, entirely veiled and wrapped in meditation; and in