sionary accusation the ground of an
armed intervention in Syria. The false accusers of the Jews of
Damascus have indeed been punished; but the French consul, the Count
de Ratti-Menton, has since been rewarded by his government with a high
promotion in the diplomatic department!

Once more, "a truce to digression," let us see what the ancient
cemetery of the Innocents was like. Round an irregular four-sided
space, about five hundred feet by two, ran a low cloister-like
building, called Les Charniers, or the Charnel Houses. It had
originally been a cloister surrounding the churchyard; but, so
convenient had this place of sepulture been found, from its situation
in the heart of Paris, that the remains of mortality increased in most
rapid proportion within its precincts, and it was continually found
necessary to transfer the bones of long-interred, and long-forgotten
bodies, to the shelter of the cloisters. Here, then, they were piled
up in close order--the bones below and the skulls above; they reached
in later times to the very rafters of these spacious cloisters all
round, and heaps of skulls and bones lay in unseemly groups on the
grass in the midst of the graveyard. At one corner of the church was a
small grated window, where a recluse, like her of St Opportune, had
worn away forty-six years of her life, after one year's confinement as
a preparatory experiment; and within the church was a splendid brass
tomb, commemorating this refinement of the monastic virtues. At
various spots about the cemetery, were erected obelisks and crosses of
different dates, while against the walls of the church and cloister
were affixed, in motley and untidy confusion, unnumbered tablets and
other memorials of the dead. The suppression of this cemetery, just at
the commencement of the Revolution, was a real benefit to the capital;
and when the contents of the yard and its charnel-houses were removed
to the catacombs south of the city, it was calculated that the remains
of two millions of human beings rattled down the deep shafts of the
stone pits to their second interment. In place of the cemetery, we now
find the wooden stalls of the Covent Garden of Paris; low, dirty,
unpainted, ill-built, badly-drained, stinking, and noisy; and their
tenants are not better than themselves. Like their neighbours, the
famous Poissardes, the Dames de la Halle as they are styled, are the
quintessence of all that is disgusting in Paris. Covent Garden is
wort