arent power to enjoy, and those are
moved to tears by the spectacle of a Dauphin surrendered to the coarse
and brutal tutelage of a sans-culotte, who read without emotion of
thousands of Huguenot children torn from their mothers' arms and flung
to the novercal cruelties of strangers in blood and creed. In the
earlier chapters the legendary aspect of the story has been drawn upon
rather more perhaps than an austere historical conscience would
approve, but it is precisely a familiarity with these romantic
stories, which at least are true in impression if not in fact, that
the sojourner in Paris will find most useful, translated as they are
in sculpture and in painting, on the decoration of her architecture,
both modern and ancient, and implicit in the nomenclature of her ways.

The story of Paris presents a marked contrast with that of an Italian
city-state whose rise, culmination and fall may be roundly traced.
Paris is yet in the stage of lusty growth. Time after time, like a
young giantess, she has burst her cincture of walls, cast off her
outworn garments and renewed her armour and vesture. Hers are no
grass-grown squares and deserted streets; no ruined splendours telling
of pride abased and glory departed; no sad memories of waning cities
once the mistresses of sea and land; none of the tears evoked by a
great historic tragedy; none of the solemn pathos of decay and death.
Paris has more than once tasted the bitterness of humiliation;
Norseman and Briton, Russian and German have bruised her fair body;
the dire distress of civic strife has exhausted her strength, but she
has always emerged from her trials with marvellous recuperation, more
flourishing than before.

Since 1871, when the city, crushed under a twofold calamity of foreign
invasion and of internecine war, seemed doomed to bleed away to feeble
insignificance, her prosperity has so increased that house rent has
doubled and population risen from 1,825,274 in 1870 to 2,714,068 in
1901. The growth of Paris from the settlement of an obscure Gallic
tribe to the most populous, the most cultured, the most artistic, the
most delightful and seductive of continental cities has been
prodigious, yet withal she has maintained her essential unity, her
corporate sense and peculiar individuality. Paris, unlike London, has
never expatiated to the effacement of her distinctive features and the
loss of civic consciousness. The city has still a definite outline and
circumfere