her dress, and talks execrable French; and the young man who manages the purse was there ever such a hat seen on the head of a Frenchman, and coat with a waist that pinches him under the arms? "Sacre!" whispers the thick moustached man at the next table; "quel Anglais quel chapeau! quel habit! Mon Dieu!" With what an air of calm dignity the manager paces up and down, with his napkin, white as snow, laid over his left arm, and with what infinite grace he meets the salutations of every new comer! There is, not far away-perhaps on the opposite side-" Le Grand Vatel." It is, we fancy, a shade lower in price, but there is veritable romance in eating under the name of such a patron of the cuisine. Vatel lived in the time of Louis XIV., when flourished everything that could quicken appetite and excite desire. Poor man! he did not see the end of it! He had gone to Chantilly to prepare a fête; the King arrived; the supper was served; by a mistake, two tables were without roasts. It cut Vatel to the quick. My honor is ruined," said he. Fortunately, the table of the King was served. This restored courage to poor Vatel. Still, for twelve nights he did not sleep. He told his friend Gourville, and Gourville told the Prince. The Prince came to console Vatel. "Nothing could be finer," said he. Monseigneur," replied Vatel, "your goodness overpowers me; but I know very well that two of the tables had no 'roasts.'" knock; they break open the door. They find him bathed in blood and stone dead! And "Pauvre Vatel!" said the Prince. now they sell dinners for a franc and fifty centimes at the sign of Le Grand Vatel. We ate of marais at the little tables, but it was not fresh. Browne, the philosopher, says, whatever may be a man's character, or complexion, or habits, he will find a match for them in London. Whatever may be a man's taste or his means, he may find the gratification of them, at some rate, at Paris. If the Palais Royal, from the little tobacco women to the fournisseur du roi, be too extravagant for one's means, if he can neither pay two sous for his chair under the windows, nor take a six sous demi-tasse at the Rotunda, nor a dinner at such as the Grand Vatel, he finds another neighborhood that ranges lower; but be sure, he will indulge, on a Sunday afternoon, on the stone benches along the borders of the court, and, ten to one, luxuriate in a sou cigar. Other days, he may be seen stealing his way cautiously down the Rue St. Honore, and turning into some of those streets that branch off toward the Quay, or the other side of the river. He knows every alley that ramifies from the Rue de l'Ecole de Medicin, and may even venture, on fast days, into the neighborhood of the long shadowing Pantheon. And there may be picked up dinners, such as they are, for twelve sous and eight sous, not a stone's throw from the towers of St. Sulpice. And what shall be said of the chop-houses of St. Denis and Montmartre ? Curious looking chops, sure enough, with queer shaped bones, that would puzzle a Cuvier to work into the skeleton of a beast that bleats or grunts, but cheap for all that; a potatoe and bread, for five sous. There may be seen luscious dinners at five, not far from the Pont St. Michel, and in the neighborhood of the Halle au Blé. And in the Faubourg St. Martin-the number escapes our memory, but the police will direct the curious, and the savory smells will guide the hungry-there is a huge pot boiling from 12 to 6, filled with such choice tit-bits as draw, every day, scores of adventurers. A huge iron fork lays *Madame de Sevigne tells pleasantly the story of this mishap of Le Grand Vatel, "dont la bonne tete etait capable de contenir tout le soin d'un etat." The cooks of the present, guard as scrupulously their honor, as in that luxurious age; and there are many unquiet souls, beside those who eat of the fruits of French culinary skill. across the mouth of the pot, and whoever wishes to make the venture, pays two sous for a strike. If he succeeds in transfixing a piece of beef, (or what passes for beef, in the dialect of the quartier,) he has achieved his dinner, and at a low rate-albeit he has it in his fingers without sauce or corrective. Unfortunately, however, many poor fellows ruin their hopes by striking too strongly and dashing all before them, and they are mortified at seeing the fragments of some huge bit of meat, which their energy has shattered, floating in savory morsels to the top. On dit, that once upon a time, there came up upon the tines of the fork, after a vigorous thrust, a heavy, black looking substance, which proved to be the front of a soldier's cap. It came to the ears of the authorities. A posse of police came down upon the luckless restaurateur, and made seizure of all the bones about his establishment. Thorough inquiry was instituted at the various caserns, to ascertain if any soldier was missing. Fortunately no human bones were found in the restaurateur's collection, and with suitable admonition, his effects were restored; and to this day the pot boils. It is not strictly reputable to be seen venturing one's chance for dinner at such places, and we are creditably assured that some medical students and barbers have lost caste with their profession, for cultivating too great familiarity in such neighborhoods. Better dinners, and safer, as a whole, may be had in the great square of the Marché des Innocens. What more glorious salon? The bright blue sky of a Paris summer overhead-tall old buildings lifting their quaint gables, mingled with elegant modern fronts on every side -the great fountain pouring over in floods its bubbling and sparkling torrents, making the air cool, even in the heats of July; and around, rich stores of richest vegetables, and fruits of every hue and shape, from the fine gardens of Normandy; and among the stores, the picturesque costumes of Brittany, and queer caps and petticoats, and honest, ruddy faces that have ripened on the sunny banks of the Loire. A dinner place for a poet, and as a poet's dinner ought to be―" dog-cheap." Just around the edge of the basin, that catches within its lips of stone the waters of the fountain, are arranged some half dozen deal tables, and at one side, here and there, pots are boiling, and bowls and spoons in readiness, and an old lady, with a huge hankerchief upon her head, to serve you. You may find beans, or potatoes, or meat, and you may have a bowl of either of the two first for a sou, but bread and salt are extras; meat ranges a trifle higher; and few but the aristocrats of the place, or strangers, presume upon the meat. No better place, for the price, can be found in Paris; we have pursued investigations so far, with the good Abbe G., as to feel assured of this fact. If it rains, of course an umbrella must be carried, or the broth, which is not the least part of the dinner, will become cool. One may end with a handful of the richest plums, and as cheap as the broth. Outside the Barriers of the Octroi, up and down the Seine, and at the Barrier du Trône, are restaurants for such as choose to walk further and pay less, or who prefer a poor rabbit to a fat cat. Little stands of fruit, and wine and cake abound, where they escape the tithe of the douanier; and how cheap a good dinner may be got at such suburban towns as Corbeil, or St. Denis, will belong to other notes than these of Paris. Nor have we yet done with dinners within the limits of the capital. Many a poor fellow is, at this very hour, 5 of the afternoon, perspiring over a chafing pan of coals, whose fumes escape at a broken pane of glass, and over which is sissing and steaming a little miserable apology for a rump steak. These are the single men who wish to keep up appearances, and you might see one of them upon the Boulevard, and never guess but he was a diner at a reputable restaurant; except you might observe that his wristbands were turned carefully up out of sight, and his shirt-collar covered with a black cravat. Poor fellow, he has no shirt!-though the coat is a good one in its way, and so with the hat. On fête days he shows linen, and calls for a bottle of ordinary beer at one of the cafés up the Champs Elysées. On other days, as we say, his means oblige him to cut the restaurants, and take a small cut of the butcher off the fore-quarter and near the knuckle. Sometimes he takes the knuckle itself for a bit of soup, and with a little potatoe and parsley and salt, followed by a piece of bread, it really makes a palatable dinner. There are poor artists, and American ones among them, who, for worthier motives than occasional dress, eat their dinners thus, rather than risk the doubt G said no, and thereupon we staked the wine, and appealed across the table. We lost our bet, but the man had lived fifteen years in England' We must not linger longer at dinner, but close with one look at the Paris world an hour after. The cafés are full ful meats in the lower class of restaurants. opposite us was an Englishman. Our No dinner of ordinary bulk, ranging evidence was-he ate mustard with his much under two francs, can be eaten in roast beef, and called for a hot plate. Paris without suspicion; unless, indeed, Could there be better? it be of those vegetable potages which are served up under the rich old fountain of the Marché des Innocens. None understand the economy of eating better than the French: a knuckle will serve them further than a haunch an ordinary man. All the arts of securing nutrition from that which chemists might, by the weak tests of their laboratory, declare to have no nutritious matter at all, belong peculiarly to the alchemy of French cookery. There is no part of the brute structure but yields something in the form of digestible dishes to their rigorous investigations. Whatever will season a soup, or flavor a pudding, in the vegetable world, is known. It has been submitted to their kitchen analysis; and the Synthesis-to use the language of the schools-is even more wonderful than the strange results of their analysis. Compounds without number-amalgamations of qualities as opposite as nature could form them-combination heaped upon combination, and a name for each successive product, chosen with the same skill that directs the formation of the quality to be named: so that poor as the French language is in general terms, none is richer in table vocabulary, and their omelette and fricandeau pass muster in nearly all the languages of Europe. But simplicity is no part of a French cook's study, and a plain done sirloin of beef would give a shock to a Parisian Vatel that a month's diet upon fricasees and patés could hardly repair. Just as inane speculations become the result of close pursued metaphysical inquiry and "mist-the common gloss of Theologians," these Messieurs fancy that, without employing every refinement of their art, nothing can result from it to their honor. There was an old lady, English, who cooked roast beef and made plumpudding under the west side of the Madaleine, and her tables were always full; the only real English beef in Paris, we found there; they pretend to it at the Royal, and the British Tavern, but the beef has no smell of the shambles. We give the palm to the old lady. We have, however, no great cause to remember her little rooms with favor, since we lost there a fair made bet for a couple of bottles of Chablis. We declared to our friend G, that the red-faced man lounging, talking, sipping, reading, are the after-dinner employments. Perhaps, one more energetic than the rest smokes a cigar, and saunters up the court of the Palais Royal; and what throngs are strolling under the glass roof of the Galerie d'Orleans! The shop girls, who, we should have said, take their dishes behind the counter, are idling, gazing, chatting; hurry is written on no one's countenance; the omnibuses are at the, fullest, but only because the after-dinner world is too lazy to walk. The chairs in the court of the Palais, and up the garden of the Tuilleries, and all along the Champs Elysées are filling. The stone seats along the Boulevard are full; the Place de la Bourse is empty-save that a knot of men, sprinkled with two or three serjeants de ville, who are crowding at the door of the Vaudeville. The Entr' acte, and programme sellers are noisy in the corner of the Palais Royal, and seasonticket sellers are on the look out at the opera and at the Ambigu Comique. Le marchand d'habits' is silent. Les haricots verts' are sold; le decrotteur has slunk from the thoroughfares into the neighborhood of the theatres; the lemonade seller, and gingerbread woman have taken their stand at the gates of the garden, and the carriages are thronging in and out of the Barrier de l'Etoile. The wine-shops are doing a fair trade; ices are in demand and glisten along the Boulevards, but the best are at the Glacier de Nâple, in the Rue de Rivoli; the little widow lady, with her English ale and beer, is pushing brisk bargains with red-nosed men, who find with her the only place where one can revive the times of the tankard and the pipes. The trees that skirt the canal under the Angel Column of the Bastille are shading little troops of women and children; and servant girls have stolen a moment to sit at the Café opposite for a bottle of five sous beer; the Place Royale has its coteries of broken-down old men and fidgetty old women, and as evening sets in, they stroll off under the dim arcades. The gardens of the Luxembourg are full, and the fountains are pouring into the air; and under the walls of the great caserne upon the Champs de Mars, you may hear the laugh of the cavalry men, as they give their horses the night's grooming; the crippled invalids are stumping it with short pipes and wooden legs, in front of their grand caravanserie. Even in the narrow streets of the cité, there is comparative quiet; the Rue des Mauvais Garçons is still; and at the sixth story windows of the Hotel Dieu and La Charité, you may see the convalescents sunning themselves in the last beams of daypuffing away in their queer long caps. Our paper is full, or how we would love dearly to follow this strange Paris life still farther to stroll through the rich old doorways of Notre Dame, when the sun is saying his evening prayers in glorious colors upon the pavement, (we are sure we are not irreverent in ascribing the splendor of heaven's light to the glory of its Creator,) and what pleasure to watch the evening worshipers dropping silently on their knees, and praying "as the night cometh!" And we might follow, not without instruction, this volatile world into its places of amusement. What array of theatres, from the little Comté and Montmartre, to the Academie Royale! And the booths and puppet shows, and dioramas, and the swinging boats, and Bals Mabib, and Ranelagh,-what faces, what dress, what wonders! "Qui vit sans folie n'est pas si sage qu'il le croit." -a true Gallic saying, but not without its applicability the wide world over. Take away from the continental capital its amusements, and what would be left ? Not so much as of old Rome, between the Piazza del Popolo and the capitol. We, then, dear reader, as wishing to know, not what Paris ought to be, but what it is, will some other month resume our march together, making our starting point the ticket box of the Theatre de la Porte S. Martin. CAIUS. TALFOURD AND STEPHEN.* THE English press has furnished within the last few years some of the most brilliant examples of essay-writing that can be found in any language, whether ancient or modern. Indeed, since that bright constellation of Poets, which, within the memory of the present generation, conspicuous in the heavens, has passed from the view of mortal men, until now, Wordsworth is the only remaining star-literature is almost entirely merged in this species of prose. Sometimes it assumes a didactic form, sometimes attempts to collect and tie up the broken threads of history: now it draws out with greater minuteness the nice details of biography, and now again it grasps the pruning-hook of the critic, and cuts away the superfluous branches of many an author. This last occupation, however, has softened its features a good deal within the last few years. Criticism, from being the heartless censor, and sometimes the mortal enemy of genius, has come at length to be its guide and traveling-companion. Rome will never shelter the ashes of another Keats, leaving his native country disappointed and wasted, to die of his wounds among strangers. It is not likely that another race of Broughams and Geoffreys will ever have unbridled range of the realms of criticism, hovering like buccaneers upon the high seas about the shrouds of many a luckless author, to send his little craft to the bottom from the mere love of enterprise. This change, so obvious to every reader, in the tone of review-essays, was owing, in a good de The modern British Essayists. Published by Carey and Hart, Philadelphia. gree, among other causes, to the unexpected and terrible resistance of Lord Byron, one of the early victims of the Edinburgh Review. That a young nobleman who had scarcely yet attained to years of majority, should turn upon his pursuers with such a determined energy; that he should follow them so up closely, and involve them so remorselessly, as if in the folds of a serpent, whose power to crush their puny frames was only equaled by the malignant venom of his bite, was so unexpected and appalling that they shrunk away in terror and utter discomfiture. The young poet had been so much more severe upon his cotempories than any mere prose critic could be, that they gave over the chase in despair. THOMAS NOON TALFOURD-The author now principally under consideration is one of the most remarkable men of his time. Rising as he has done from a station comparatively humble, with no rank or prerogative save that deep impression, where nature and genius have set their seal, he has come gradually by patient application and elaborate art, to fill a niche among the highest of earthly fame. Self-knowledge seems to be a characteristic of truly great minds; and no man understands himself better than Talfourd. In that beautiful dedicatory preface to his tragedies, he has given to the world a more perfect analysis and accurate delineation of his own mind than the hand of any stranger could ever have noted down. He there gives the readers, by a few happy strokes of the pen, a complete history of himself. Who could have thought, had not the writer himself told us so, that the beautful Ion, with its happy disposition of parts, its delicate pencilings, its chaste images, its nice finish of thought, and above all, the accomplished characters that figure in it who could have thought, that with all its freshness and bold freedom, it could have remained concealed in the author's mind from boyhood to ripe manhood, gradually shaping itself by constant accretions, into symmetry and beauty, like the crystallizations of some mountain cave? Who could have imagined, but for the information thus communicated, that this graceful structure, so fairy-like that it might seem to be frost-work, was attempted, and thrown aside again and again, until the author seemed to stand like an anxious architect amidst the scattered marble-blocks of some ancient ruin, that were about to assume proportions entirely different from the old, under his plastic hand? And yet chiseled, artistic as it is, it is a work of genius. It stops short at no "tame, trite medium." Ornate and classical as it presents itself to the eye, its massive pillars are so deeply imbedded in the earth, its arches rise with such well-adjusted curves, that the beholder cannot fail to be impressed with the idea that it must endure for ages. In this business-like age, when men are hurried from place to place, and object to object, with the haste and precipitancy almost of waters taking their plunge from a headlong precipice, it is almost like the discovery of a new planet in the heavens, to find in this floating waste one little island sequestered to poetic feeling and calm contemplation. Still more remarkable is it, and worthy by way of pre-eminence, to pass almost for a miracle, that there should be found a man, in the very midst of all this hubbub and restlessness, who could carry for years, wrapped up in the dusty files and scant briefs that fill the brim of a practising lawyer, the germ of the most perfect drama. A poetic lawyer-a dramatic practitioner in the Queen's courts. Truly this is a marvel reserved peculiarly for the nineteenth century! Why, did not that very profession compel Sir William Blackstone to bid a final farewell to his Muse?-did not its forbidding features repress the literary taste of Lord Eldon?-did it not fold in its stiffening embrace, the elastic imagination of the more accomplished Stowell? Did not even Sir Walter Scott, sometime sheriff of Selkirk, and clerk of the Sessions court, find it necessary to choose, at length, which he would serve whether the wild genius of border-chivalry, or the grave Themis of the Scottish bar? Surely, had Talfourd only united these two most incongruous elements, it would have been enough to keep his memory bright, and his name distinct from all other men of the present generation. But the little volume before us, bearing the title of "Critical and Miscellaneous Writings of T. N. Talfourd," shows unequivocally that his attention has been long and patiently directed to the higher orders of prose composition. In this department the same unpretending, modest demeanor distinguishes the man. does not try to say grand or startling things, he never strains after paradoxes, He |