barous splendour of the architecture, and the ornaments
profuse and enormous with which it is overladen. Think of Louis XVI.
with a thousand gentlemen at his back, and a mob of yelling ruffians in
front of him, giving up his crown without a fight for it; leaving his
friends to be butchered, and himself sneaking into prison! No end of
little children were skipping and playing in the sunshiny walks, with
dresses as bright and cheeks as red as the flowers and roses in the
parterres. I couldn't help thinking of Barbaroux and his bloody pikemen
swarming in the gardens, and fancied the Swiss in the windows yonder;
where they were to be slaughtered when the King had turned his back.
What a great man that Carlyle is! I have read the battle in his History
so often, that I knew it before I had seen it. Our windows look out
on the obelisk where the guillotine stood. The Colonel doesn't admire
Carlyle. He says Mrs. Graham's Letters from Paris are excellent, and we
bought Scott's Visit to Paris, and Paris Re-visited, and read them in
the diligence. They are famous good reading; but the Palais Royal is
very much altered since Scott's time: no end of handsome shops; I went
there directly,--the same night we arrived, when the Colonel went to
bed. But there is none of the fun going on which Scott describes. The
laquais de place says Charles X. put an end to it all.

"Next morning the governor had letters to deliver after breakfast, and
left me at the Louvre door. I shall come and live here, I think. I feel
as if I never want to go away. I had not been ten minutes in the place
before I fell in love with the most beautiful creature the world has
ever seen. She was standing silent and majestic in the centre of one
of the rooms of the statue-gallery; and the very first glimpse of her
struck one breathless with the sense of her beauty. I could not see the
colour of her eyes and hair exactly, but the latter is light, and the
eyes I should think are grey. Her complexion is of a beautiful warm
marble tinge. She is not a clever woman, evidently; I do not think she
laughs or talks much--she seems too lazy to do more than smile. She is
only beautiful. This divine creature has lost an arm, which has been
cut off at the shoulder, but she looks none the less lovely for the
accident. She maybe some two-and-thirty years old; and she was born
about two thousand years ago. Her name is the Venus of Milo. O Victrix!
O lucky Paris! (I don't mean this present