think, what I have seen of Paris is wholly unlike what I expected; but
very like an imaginary picture which I had conceived of St. Petersburg,--
new, bright, magnificent, and desperately cold.

A great part of this architectural splendor is due to the present
Emperor, who has wrought a great change in the aspect of the city within
a very few years. A traveller, if he looks at the thing selfishly, ought
to wish him a long reign and arbitrary power, since he makes it his
policy to illustrate his capital with palatial edifices, which are,
however, better for a stranger to look at, than for his own people to pay
for.

We have spent to-day chiefly in seeing some of the galleries of the
Louvre. I must confess that the vast and beautiful edifice struck me far
more than the pictures, sculpture, and curiosities which it contains,--
the shell more than the kernel inside; such noble suites of rooms and
halls were those through which we first passed, containing Egyptian, and,
farther onward, Greek and Roman antiquities; the walls cased in
variegated marbles; the ceilings glowing with beautiful frescos; the
whole extended into infinite vistas by mirrors that seemed like vacancy,
and multiplied everything forever. The picture-rooms are not so
brilliant, and the pictures themselves did not greatly win upon me in
this one day. Many artists were employed in copying them, especially in
the rooms hung with the productions of French painters. Not a few of
these copyists were females; most of them were young men, picturesquely
mustached and bearded; but some were elderly, who, it was pitiful to
think, had passed through life without so much success as now to paint
pictures of their own.

From the pictures we went into a suite of rooms where are preserved many