with his embroidered coats of many colours,
and that dear eccentric Abbé Dubois, his
minister. And Mr. John Law's scheme,
—rather expensive it must be allowed—
but Monsieur Law gave such magnificent
entertainments at his hôtel in the Place
Vendome, and such a crowd of
archbishops, princes, dukes, and noble ladies, that
followed at his heels, begging and praying for
shares. And there was Cartouche, that
romantic robber; and that other brigand,
whose name we forget, but who was
nicknamed Monseigneur, from his perfect courtesy
and politeness of manner. And there were
the petits soupers, and the petites maisons, and
the loges grillées, and the balls at the Opera,
and the grey mousquetaires, and hoops and
powder, and patches, and buhl tables, and
china monsters, and poets who recited their
verses in the boudoirs of Duchesses, and
painters who transferred those Duchesses to
canvas. Why, the whole of that merry,
spangled Regency was long holiday! Granted.
France, during the Regency, wore a brilliant
holiday costume: a peach-coloured velvet
coat, barred with gold and festooned with
diamonds, cloth of gold waistcoat, crimson
brocade smalls, fifty thousand francs' worth of
lace at the throat and wrists; silk stockings,
gold clocks, red heels, jewelled-hilted swords,
powder, patches, a dancing master's kit in one
hand and a pasteboard puppet in the other;
pockets crammed with pink billet doux, lettres-
de-cachet, and John Law's Mississippi shares;
folly on his lips and vice in his heart. But were
there none who wore other raiment during that
same Regency. How many hundred half-naked
prisoners were languishing in the dungeons of
the Bastile, by the orders of the eccentric
Cardinal Abbé Dubois. What sort of clothes
wore those men, prosperous merchants once,
ruined by John Law's famous scheme, who
went forth to beg on the highway? What
clothes had the poets and the painters when
they went from the Duchess's boudoir to
die in the hospital, like Guillebert and
Lantara? What clothes, if any, had the miserable
serfs, who writhed beneath the thraldom of
the holiday makers in velvet— of the Abbés,
who wrote sonnets, and read their breviaries
in the intervals of a petit souper—who lived on
the black, filthy, nauseous substance
complacently termed bread, and a loaf of which
the Duke de la Valliere threw down on the
council-table before the boy King, Louis the
Fifteenth, saying, "There, Sire. Some millions
of your subjects eat that!" Did you ever
hear of one Barbier, Advocate of the Parliament
of Paris, whose private journal of the
Regency was lately published? Barbier was
the French Pepys, a gossipping, meddling,
ill-conditioned busybody; but without Pepys'
good-nature or hospitality. He had an
auctioneer's talent for description, and a keen
nose for scandal; and half-an-hour's desultory
sauntering through his slipslop pages, will
teach you some strange secrets of the plain
clothes of the good City of Paris during the
Regency.

If I name Paris during the revolution, and
especially during the reign of terror, the
one-sided enthusiasts fly into the opposite
extreme. Even then, Paris wore other clothes
than the bloody masquerade dress she did her
butcher's work in at the Abbaye, the
Conciergerie, and in the Place Louis Quinze. She
laid aside, sometimes, the scarlet Phrygian
cap and the red flag. Fouquier Tinville, Louvet,
Collot d'Herbois, were not always sanguinary
tyrants with their sleeves tucked up. They
were, I dare say, over their dinners in the Palais
National—- with short-waisted coats, flapped
waistcoats, buckskins, and top boots— mighty
pleasant fellows to meet. Some of the most
bloodthirsty of the Committee of Safety were
dramatic authors; and, Paris in plain clothes,
—quite another Paris from that yelling from
the mouths of poissardes and tricoteuses for the
lives of the aristocrats— sat smilingly listening
to such pieces as "La Mère Coupable" and
"Robert, Chef de Brigands," which were all the
rage then. There were stage-dresses for the
Convention, the club of the Jacobins, the
Noyades, and the feasts of the Goddess of
Reason; but there were plain clothes in
houses and shops, yea, and peace and quiet in
families and hearts far from the great tempest.
For all the gory fever raging, there must have
been, as now, men and women unmindful of
aristocrats and democrats, little heeding the
republic one and indivisible, and whose whole
hearts were in the quiet but deadly fight for
bread; who achieved fortunes or dreaded
bankruptcies; who hung on the smile or frown
of a mistress or a lover;—to whom every day
brought its little private good and evil.

Be not angry with me, sentimental tourists,
and writers of stanzas, and imaginative painters.
You have your Venices and Stambouls.
But I have seen so many plays, and taken so
many bad halfcrowns, in my life, that I grow
sceptical, and look twice at cities and at men,
before I take them for granted.

CHIPS.

MR. BOVINGTON ON THE NEW CATTLE-
MARKET.

Long Hornets, Bucks.

SIR,—More than two years since you
were good enough to describe my last adventure
in Smithfield market, London. I have
been a wretched man ever since. I have no
heart for breeding and fattening; I take no
pleasure in stall-feeding; I have lost all
delight in short horns; and a prime tup (I have
got four of the primest in England) is no more
to me than a bell-wether— mere mutton and
wool. My heart actually aches for my beasts.
To be killed and eaten is, I know, their natural
end; but I can't abear the thought of their
being tortured; for though I don't send them
direct to Smithfield to be baited and butchered,