have the pleasure of announcing,
for the satisfaction of such of our readers as may entertain the design
of paying a visit to that country, that the coach which Lady Morgan saw,
was the only vehicle of the kind with which her eyes could have been
annoyed. We speak _understandingly_ on the subject, as we happened to be
in France about the same time as her Ladyship. This coach, which, if we
recollect aright, was called the Telegraph, and not the "Bang-up," was a
speculation of some Englishman, who ran it for a short time between
Boulogne and Calais, but without much success. The old national vehicle
had too strong a hold upon the affections of the most national people in
the world, to be pushed from the field by any foreign opponent, and the
slow, sure, and comfortable Diligence kept on the even tenor of its way,
while the dashing, rapid Telegraph arrived prematurely at the end of its
journeying.

We do not deem ourselves competent to decide upon so momentous a subject
as the respective merits of the English and French stages, to give them
our technical appellation; but it may be remarked as perhaps somewhat
singular, that with regard to comfort--a matter respecting which the
French are as noted for their general heedlessness as the English are
for their almost uniform concern--the Diligence can lay claim to
unquestionable superiority over the coach. On the other hand, the coach
is constructed in such a way as to possess far greater facilities for
rapidity of locomotion,--a quality which it might be supposed the quick
vivacious temperament of the French would especially prize in their
conveyances. As to appearance also, the English vehicle is certainly a
good deal better off than the French. Nothing, indeed, that a stranger
may have heard or read about the latter, can prepare him for it
sufficiently, to prevent him on first beholding it from giving way to
something more than a smile. It is not, however, so much the mere
machine itself that operates upon his risible faculties, as the whole
equipage, or _atalage_,--the scare-crow horses, that seem to have been
once the property of the keeper of some museum by whom their bones have
been linked together and covered with skin as well as they might be,
without inserting something between as a substitute for flesh; the
non-descript gear by which these living anatomies are kept together and
attached to the vehicle, composed of rope, leather, iron, steel, brass,
and every thing el