life in Paris, unrelieved by some consistent and individual purpose,
will find it a succession of excitements, temporary, yet varied,--full
of the agreeable, yet barren of consecutive interest and satisfactory
results,--admirable as a recreative hygiene, deplorable as a permanent
resource; their inevitable consequence being a faith in the external, a
dependence on the immediate, and a habit of vagrant pleasure-seeking,
which must at last cloy and harden the manly soul. For this very reason,
however, the scenes, characters, and society there exhibited are
prolific of suggestion to the philosophic mind.

In every phase of life, manners, and action, we see a characteristic
excellence in detail and process, and an equally remarkable deficiency
in grand practical idea and consistent moral sentiment. The French
chemists have the art to extract quinine from Peruvian bark and conserve
the juices of meats; but one of their most patriotic writers calls
attention to the wholly diverse motives addressed by Napoleon and Nelson
to their respective followers. "Soldiers," exclaimed the former, "from
the summit of those Pyramids forty ages are looking down upon you."
"England," said the latter, "expects every man to do his duty." In
Paris, the science of dissection is perfect; in London, that of
nutrition;--Dumas has reduced plagiarism to a fine art; Cobbett made
common-sense a social lever;--a British merchant or statesman attaches
his name to a document in characters of such individuality that the
signature is known at a glance; a French official invents a flourish
so intricate that the forger's ingenuity is baffled in the attempt to
imitate it;--government, on one side of the Channel, employs a taster to
detect adulteration in wine whose sensitive palate is a fortune; on
the other, the hereditary fame of a brewery is the guaranty of the
excellence of ale.