who shivered con amore. As the town itself
is but a sickly kind of place, I thought it
by no means unlikely that before the winter's
day was over, the entire concern would
shiver itself off its balance and into the port:
which would be no great loss to the French
empire, or to humanity in general, I take it.
From these remarks, you will be enabled to form
the opinion that I do not approve of Calais. I do
not. It represents nothing to me but discontent,
disappointment, and the dismals. As for
the heroic burghers of Calais, who appeared
before Edward the Third in their shirts and with
ropes round their necks, and as for the kind-
hearted English queen who pleaded for their lives,
and had her prayer granted by her gruesome
spouse, those inexorably matter-of-fact gentlemen,
the French historians, have discovered that
the whole story is a myth, of no more trust-
worthiness than the legends of John of Paris
and Genevieve of Brabant. The burghers of
Calais, according to those destroyers of the
romantic, were traitorous shopkeepers in the
pay of King Edward, and the shirts and halters
were all a blind, and Eustache de St. Pierre
cunningly "sold" Calais to the English, and
made rather a good thing by the transaction.
Whatever there may be mythical in its history,
Calais itself, however, remains. It is not an agreeable
place. I prefer Dunkirk. I would rather be
at Boulogne. I would sooner, even, inhabit St.
Omer, although there is nothing to be found in the
last-named place but manufacturers of tobacco-
pipes, and Legitimist families, who call M. de
Chambord Henry the Fifth. Calais is gloomily
suggestive of debt, duns, broken-down dandies,
decayed billiard-markers, copper captains with
vixenish wives and dowdy daughters, bad brandy,
and bloody Queen Mary. At school we used to
read that the ever-burning queen was wont to
remark that when she died the word Calais would
be found graven on her heart. It was a fit aspiration
for the tar-barrel of a woman, and it is some
consolation to know that the only human being
who ever liked Calais, and regretted its loss, was
the moody spouse of Philip of Spain.

The person who was to meet me, arrived, after
a seasonably stormy passage, and went back again
to Dover next day. And there was another letter
to be brought to me; and the person, after travelling
to London, had to return once more to Dover,
and rejoin me at Calais. I don't think I ever spent
a drearier time than I did from that Saturday to
that Monday. I have been snowed up, frozen
up, burnt out, and inundated. I have been
besieged by the yellow fever and the cholera. I
have been beleaguered by a hostile army in the
society of some thousands of citizens, and
bombarded. I have been in the defunct Queen's
Bench; I have been laid up with a sprained
ankle in a garret, short of coals, on a foggy day,
and with a man playing "The Last Rose of
Summer" on a cracked flute in the street below.
I have had to undergo, at a scientific institution,
and with a serious aunt, a lecture about
Spiders. I have been to an oratorio. I have
sat out the Gamester. I have read Robertson's
history of Charles the Fifth. But I had never
"done" Calais before March last; and I humbly
hope and pray that I may never be forced to
"do" it again under similar circumstances.

I suppose I had passed through Calais
at least thirty times. But the boat, the
buffet, and the railway arrival, leave very little
of Calais to be grumbled at by the traveller who
takes the accelerated mail to Paris. How many
thousands of tourists pass through Cologne
every year, without ever seeing the cathedral
and the shrine of the three kings? Boulogne,
it is true, has become intimately known to the
travelling public; but then Boulogne is really
a charming watering-place, and, for the sake of
auld lang syne, has been so beautified and
caressed by the present Emperor of the French,
as to be almost unrecognisable by those who
knew it in the old diligence days, when it was
chiefly remarkable for dirt, dulness, and the
presence of needy Britons. Those outlaws
do not affect Boulogne much, now-a-days. The
new Bankruptcy Act has all but abrogated out-
lawry, and, again, Boulogne has grown to be so
fashionable, and so easy of access, that Britons
in debt run considerable risk of meeting their
creditors in the Rue Napoléon or at the
Etablissement. There may be sanguine spirits who
regard Calais likewise as a "watering-place."
There is certainly water enough in the port to
drown yourself, and that is all.

I am glad to record that — with a tolerably
accurate topographical memory — I do not
recollect the name of a single street in Calais,
and that I do not know whether the dismal gap
where the town-hall is situated, is called the
Grande Place, or the Place d'Armes, or the
Place de l'Hôtel de Ville. I think I saw a
blackened statue, somewhere, in a niche, with
its nose much blurred, and two fingers of the
left hand gone; but I have not the slightest
idea whether that effigy was erected to the
memory of Eustache de St. Pierre, or the French
Constable who took Calais from the English, or
Beau Brummel, or the Commendatore in Don
Giovanni.

Beau Brummel! Ha! there ought to be
something in that. I have seen the farce of
the Birthplace of Podgers, and know how
much there is to venerate in associations
hallowed by the memory of the illustrious dead.
Here I was at Calais, with nothing to do but
wait and groan — the groaning being mingled
with an occasional screech, when the aching
tooth grew jealous of the gouty toe — and what
could I do better than think about Beau
Brummel? How he lived the sad afternoon of his
butterfly life. How he died: — no, it was at Caen
that he faded away into extinction, an idiot in a
public hospital. There was a high-shouldered
long-legged old gentleman, in a wig and a short
pea-green coat with a poodle collar, trotting
before me as I hobbled painfully along, and
whom I tried to liken to Brummel. He grew
as shabby as that, I reflected. What would
Alvanley, what would his Royal Highness the
Prince Regent, have thought of that dashing