moment, and remanded her to her ugliness. However, all is well, for she knows nothing of the crime, or the sentence, or the pardon. The father and mother are very good sort of people, and have saved me from some small impositions ; for really nothing can be so shameless and abject as the frauds upon strangers. Even at the coffeehouse where I breakfast, the keeper of it, a very genteel woman, makes me almost every day pay a different price for the same thing. It is still only fair to say, the French are the civilest people upon earth, and I really believe sincerely good natured to strangers. Two nights ago I was overtaken by the national guard: I asked the officer my way; he answered so courteously, that I ventured a question or two more; he continued the same good nature, and the private next behind him assisted in doing the duties of hospitality. I said I was afraid he had led me to pass the line of respect to him, but his answer was, and in the kindest tone, Sir, a stranger, comme il faut, can never pass it in France. I doubt if I should have found it so in England. Apropos! I am quite sure the two nations hate each other as devoutly as ever; and I think their respective imperfections of character will be kept alive by the mutual spirit of contempt. Paris will think it graceful to be volatile, as long as London thinks it dignified to be dull,

MR. CURRAN TO D. LUBE, ESQ. DUBLIN.

Paris.

MY DEAR LUBE, I WRITE again, because I judge from myself, and how kindly I felt your last, that you would like to hear from me: perhaps the not being able to abstain from writing to the absent is the only certain proof that distance and memory are compatible: however, the compliment is not great, when you know that I have flung myself upon you as a correspondent only at those intervals when I could not bear my own company. The thermometer has been higher here lately than at any former time. Close, dirty streets, stewing playhouses, and a burning sun, have, perhaps naturally enough, completed the extreme depression of my spirits, and made me fit for nothing. I endeavour to dissipate, by wasting myself upon spectacles-but it won't do this day I thought to look for something gay in the catacombs. It seems all Paris stands upon a vaulted quarry, out of which the stone to build it has been taken, and it is not very rare to see an entire house sink down to its original home, and disappear. Part of this excavation has been fitted up as a residence in remainder for the grave. We went down, I think, seventy steps, and traversed more than half a mile by torch, or rather taper light, and we beheld more than 2,300,000 fragments of what once was life. They amount to four times the present population of Paris. The bones were very carefully built up, and at intervals were studded with projecting rows of skulls, with

mottos occasionally written up in Latin or French. It was a sort of caravan, mostly women: one of them asked me to translate one of those; it was, I think," in nihilum revertitur quod ex nihilo fuit.” I asked whether it gave her a sentiment of grief, or fear, or hope? She asked me what room I could see for hope in a parcel of empty skulls? "For that reason, madam, and because you know they cannot be filled with grief or fear, for all subject of either is passed." She replied, "Oui, et cependant c'est jolie." I could not guess to what she applied the epithet, so I raised the taper to her face, which I had not looked at before, and had it been any thing but the mirror of death, I should have thought she had looked into it, and applied the one reflection to the other, so perfectly unimpressed was her countenance. It did not raise her in my mind, though she was not ill looking; and when I met her above ground, after our resurrection, she appeared fit enough for the drawing rooms of the world, though not for the under cellar. I don't remember ever to have had my mind compressed into so narrow a space : so many human beings, so many actors, so many sufferers, so various in human rank, so equalized in the grave! When I stared at the congregation, I could not distinguish what head had raved, or reasoned, or hoped, or burned. I looked for thought, I looked for dimples,-I asked whither is all gone-did wisdom never flow from your lips, nor affection hang upon them-and if both or either, which was the most exalting which the most fascinating? All silent. They left me to answer for them, " So shall the fairest face appear."

I was full of the subject. In the evening I went to distract at the comedy of La Misanthrope, the best of Moliere. The severe affliction of Alceste, and the heartless coquetry of Celimene, were excellently done. It is not only tragedy that weeps-Golgotha was still an incubus upon me. I saw the moral of the piece went far beyond the stage-it only began there. Every good play ought to be just in the particular fable. It ought also (to be useful) to have a general analogy far more extensive and equally exact. Alceste is man in the abstract-Celimene is the object of his wish, whatever that may be; she smiles, and caresses, and promises. He thinks he feels the blood in her heart, for he mistakes the pulse of his own for that of hers ; he embraces the phantom, or thinks he does so, but is betrayed, and opens his eyes upon the desert at the moment he does not recollect the loss to him is little; 'tis only the loss of himself -to her it is nothing, for it is made up in the next conscription; and, at all events, whether sick or wounded, the march of man's warfare is never suspended; the moving infirmary never halts, and every day brings him a stage nearer à la Barrière d'Enfer, the entrance of the Catacombs.

This sad subject naturally turns me to another, that makes me suspect that my contempt of this world is not quite sincere. I mean the poor extravasated Irish that I meet here: I meet their ghosts as I pass, and view them as Eneas did :—

Quas abstulit atra dies et funere miscet acerbo.

How can I affect to despise a scene where my heart bleeds for every sufferer? I wish to dis

perse my feelings as a citizen of the world, and break my own monopoly of them, but they all come back to our unhappy country. One of the most beautiful touches of the prince of sensitive poets is where he tinges the wanderings of Dido with patriotism :

Sæpe longum incomitata videtur

Ire viam et Tyrios deserta quærere terra.

By the by, it does some credit to the character of humanity that we sometimes exchange the sufferings of egotism for a nobler sympathy, and lament over others instead of keeping all our tears for ourselves. What exquisite nectar must they be to those over whom they are shed! Nor perhaps should the assurance that they don't suffer alone be always withheld, because it may not be always true; because, for the purpose of consolation, it is enough if it be believed, whether true or not : if the payment is complete, is it worth while to inquire whether the coin be counterfeit or not? But with respect to our poor exiles the sympathy is most sincere as well as ardent: I had hopes that England might let them back. The season and the power of mischief is long past; the number is almost too small to do credit to the mercy that casts a look upon them. But they are destined to give their last recollection of the green fields they are never more to behold, on a foreign death bed, and to lose the sad delight of fancied visits to them in a distant grave—* * * *

I continue to feel an increasing dislike of every thing here; I probably shan't remain long. I