VI.: and it owes its present form to the enterprising spirit of Cardinal
Rohan, who purchased it of the Guise family towards the end of the XVIIth
century. There is now, neither pomp nor splendour, nor revelry, within this
vast building. All its aristocratic magnificence is fled; but the antiquary
and the man of curious research console themselves on its possessing
treasures of a more substantial and covetable kind. You are to know that it
contains the _Archives of State_ and the _Royal Printing Office_.

Paris has doubtless good reason to be proud of her public buildings; for
they are numerous, splendid, and commodious; and have the extraordinary
advantage over our own of not being tinted with soot and smoke. Indeed,
when one thinks of the sure invasion of every new stone or brick building
in London, by these enemies of external beauty, one is almost sick at heart
during the work of erection. The lower tier of windows and columns round
St. Paul's have been covered with the dirt and smoke of upwards of a
century: and the fillagree-like embellishments which distinguish the recent
restorations of Henry the VIIth's chapel, in Westminster Abbey, are already
beginning to lose their delicacy of appearance from a similar cause. But I
check myself. I am at Paris--and not in the metropolis of our own country.

A word now for STREET SCENERY. Paris is perhaps here unrivalled: still I
speak under correction--having never seen Edinburgh. But, although
_portions_ of that northern capital, from its undulating or hilly site,
must necessarily present more picturesque appearances, yet, upon the whole,
from the superior size of Paris, there must be more numerous examples of
the kind of scenery of which I am speaking. The specimens are endless. I
select only a few--the more familiar to me. In turning to the left, from
the _Boulevard Montmartre_ or _Poissoniere_, and going towards the _Rue St.
Marc_, or _Rue des Filles St. Thomas_ (as I have been in the habit of
doing, almost every morning, for the last ten days--in my way to the Royal
Library) you leave the _Rue Montmartre_ obliquely to the left. The houses
here seem to run up to the sky; and appear to have been constructed with
the same ease and facility as children build houses of cards. In every
direction about this spot, the houses, built of stone, as they generally
are, assume the most imposing and picturesque forms; and if a Canaletti
resided here, who would condescend to paint withou