there. It is quite a different world from the streets usually known to,
and tenanted by the English--there, indeed, you are among the French, the
fossilized remains of the old regime--the very houses have an air of
desolate, yet venerable grandeur--you never pass by the white and modern
mansion of a nouveau riche; all, even to the ruggedness of the pave,
breathes a haughty disdain of innovation--you cross one of the numerous
bridges, and you enter into another time--you are inhaling the atmosphere
of a past century; no flaunting boutique, French in its trumpery, English
in its prices, stares you in the face; no stiff coats and unnatural gaits
are seen anglicising up the melancholy streets. Vast hotels, with their
gloomy frontals, and magnificent contempt of comfort; shops, such as
shops might have been in the aristocratic days of Louis Quatorze, ere
British vulgarities made them insolent and dear; public edifices, still
redolent of the superb charities of le grand monarque--carriages with
their huge bodies and ample decorations; horses, with their Norman
dimensions and undocked honours; men, on whose more high though not less
courteous demeanour, the revolution seems to have wrought no democratic
plebeianism--all strike on the mind with a vague and nameless impression
of antiquity; a something solemn even in gaiety, and faded in pomp,
appear to linger over all you behold; there are the Great French people
unadulterated by change, unsullied with the commerce of the vagrant and
various tribes that throng their mighty mart of enjoyments.

The strangers who fill the quartiers on this side the Seine pass not
there; between them and the Faubourg there is a gulf; the very skies seem
different--your own feelings, thoughts--nature itself--alter, when you
have passed that Styx which divides the wanderers from the habitants;
your spirits are not so much damped, as tinged, refined, ennobled by a
certain inexpressible awe--you are girt with the stateliness of Eld, and
you tread the gloomy streets with the dignity of a man, who is recalling