about
our everyday business again, and not be hustled by the gendarmes or the
crowd.

The sight which I have just come away from is as brilliant, happy, and
beautiful as can be conceived; and if you want to see French people to
the greatest advantage, you should go to a festival like this, where
their manners, and innocent gayety, show a very pleasing contrast to the
coarse and vulgar hilarity which the same class would exhibit in our
own country--at Epsom racecourse, for instance, or Greenwich Fair. The
greatest noise that I heard was that of a company of jolly villagers
from a place in the neighborhood of Paris, who, as soon as the fireworks
were over, formed themselves into a line, three or four abreast, and so
marched singing home. As for the fireworks, squibs and crackers are very
hard to describe, and very little was to be seen of them: to me, the
prettiest sight was the vast, orderly, happy crowd, the number of
children, and the extraordinary care and kindness of the parents towards
these little creatures. It does one good to see honest, heavy epiciers,
fathers of families, playing with them in the Tuileries, or, as
to-night, bearing them stoutly on their shoulders, through many long
hours, in order that the little ones too may have their share of the
fun. John Bull, I fear, is more selfish: he does not take Mrs. Bull to
the public-house; but leaves her, for the most part, to take care of the
children at home.

The fete, then, is over; the pompous black pyramid at the Louvre is only
a skeleton now; all the flags have been miraculously whisked away during
the night, and the fine chandeliers which glittered down the Champs
Elysees for full half a mile, have been consigned to their dens and
darkness. Will they ever be reproduced for other celebrations of the
glorious 29th of July?--I think not; the Government which vowed that
there should be no more persecutions of the press, was, on that very
29th, seizing a Legitimist paper, for some real or fancied offence
against it: it had seized, and was seizing daily, numbers of persons
merely suspected of being disaffected (and you may fancy how liberty is
understood, when some of these prisoners, the other day, on coming to
trial, were found guilty and sentenced to ONE day's imprisonment, after
THIRTY-SIX DAYS' DETENTION ON SUSPICION). I think the Government
which follows such a system, cannot be very anxious about any farther
revolutionary fetes, and that the Chamber ma