patriotism--patriotism which consists in insulting their fathers with
forgetfulness, and surrounding their children with temptation.

266. I am far from intending my words to involve any disrespectful
allusion to the very noble improvements in the city of Paris itself,
lately carried out under the encouragement of the Emperor. Paris, in its
own peculiar character of bright magnificence, had nothing to fear, and
everything to gain, from the gorgeous prolongation of the Rue Rivoli.
But I speak of the general influence of the rich travelers and
proprietors of Europe on the cities which they pretend to admire, or
endeavor to improve. I speak of the changes wrought during my own
lifetime on the cities of Venice, Florence, Geneva, Lucerne, and chief
of all on Rouen, a city altogether inestimable for its retention of
mediaeval character in the infinitely varied streets in which one half of
the existing and inhabited houses date from the 15th or early 16th
century, and the only town left in France in which the effect of old
French domestic architecture can yet be seen in its collective groups.
But when I was there, this last spring, I heard that these noble old
Norman houses are all, as speedily as may be, to be stripped of the dark
slates which protected their timbers, and deliberately whitewashed over
all their sculptures and ornaments, in order to bring the interior of
the town into some conformity with the "handsome fronts" of the hotels
and offices on the quay.

Hotels and offices, and "handsome fronts" in general--they can be built
in America or Australia--built at any moment, and in any height of
splendor. But who shall give us back, when once destroyed, the
habitations of the French chivalry and bourgeoisie in the days of the
Field of the Cloth of Gold?

267. It is strange that no one seems to think of this! What do men
travel for, in this Europe of ours? Is it only to gamble with French
dies--to drink coffee out of French porcelain--to dance to the beat of
German drums, and sleep in the soft air of Italy? Are the ball-room, the
billiard-room, and the Boulevard, the only attractions that win us into
wandering, or tempt us to repose? And when the time is come, as come it
will, and that shortly, when the parsimony--or lassitude--which, for the
most part, are the only protectors of the remnants of elder time, shall
be scattered by the advance of civilization--when all the monuments,
preserved only because it was too cost