hearted in youth, mayhap, like Charles the Martyr when the companion of Buckingham, but conformed, both of them, by suffering, to the image of their Lord.

The view of Paris from the top of the Pantheon is superb. We had the very best sort of day for it, a succession of black hail-storms with intervenings of whitest, wannest sunshine. We saw the whole city, with the bleached towers of Vincennes, the Sorbonne at our feet, with the college Henri Quatre; and, in short, the finest city view I have almost ever seen. It were easy, from the dome of the Pantheon, to describe the topography of Paris, but it has been done by a Frenchman himself, with so much picturesque erudition, that I shall borrow his account, the length of which will not weary the reader 3.

"The infant Paris was born, as everybody knows, in that ancient island in the shape of a cradle, which is now called the city. The banks of that island were its first enclosure; the Seine was its first ditch. For several centuries Paris was confined to the island, having two bridges, the one on the north, the other on the south, and two têtes-de-ponts, which were at once its gates and its fortresses-the Grand Châtelet on the right bank, and the Petit Châtelet on the left. In process of time, under the kings of the first dynasty, finding herself straitened in her island, and unable to turn herself about, she

3 Victor Hugo's Hunchback, book iii.-Shoberl's Translation.

crossed the water. A first enclosure of walls and towers then began to encroach upon either bank of the Seine beyond the two Châtelets. Of this ancient enclosure some vestiges were still remaining in the past century; nothing is now left of it but the memory, and here and there a tradition. By degrees, the flood of houses, always propelled from the heart to the extremities, wore away and overflowed this enclosure. Philip Augustus surrounded Paris with new ramparts. He imprisoned the city within a circular chain of large, lofty, and massive towers. For more than a century, the houses, crowding closer and closer, raised their level in this basin, like water in a reservoir. They began to grow higher; story was piled upon story; they shot up like any compressed liquid, and each tried to lift its head above its neighbour's, in order to obtain a little fresh air. The streets became deeper and deeper, and narrower and narrower; every vacant place was covered, and disappeared. The houses at length overleaped the wall of Philip Augustus, and merrily scattered themselves at random over the plain, like prisoners who had made their escape. There they sat themselves down at their ease, and carved themselves gardens out of the fields. So early as 1367, the suburbs of the city had spread so far as to need a fresh enclosure, especially on the right bank: this was built for it by Charles V. But a place like Paris is perpetually increasing. It is such cities alone that become

capitals of countries. They are reservoirs, into which all the geographical, political, moral, and intellectual channels of a country, all the natural inclined planes of its population discharge themselves; wells of civilization, if we may be allowed the expression, and drains also, where all that constitutes the sap, the life, the soul of a nation, is incessantly collecting and filtering, drop by drop, age by age. The enclosure of Charles V. consequently shared the same fate as that of Philip Augustus. So early as the conclusion of the fifteenth century it was overtaken, passed, and the suburbs kept travelling onward. In the sixteenth, it seemed to be visibly receding more and more into the ancient city, so rapidly did the new town thicken on the other side of it. Thus, so far back as the fifteenth century, to come down no further, Paris had already worn out the three concentric circles of walls, which, from the time of Julian the Apostate, lay in embryo, if I may be allowed the expression, in the Grand and Petit Châtelet. The mighty city had successively burst its four mural belts, like a growing boy bursting the garments made for him a year ago. Under Louis XI. there were still to be seen ruined towers of the ancient enclosures, rising at intervals abovet his sea of houses, like the tops of hills from amidst an inundation, like the archipelagoes of old Paris submerged beneath the new. Since that time Paris has, unluckily for us, undergone further transformation, but it has overleaped

only one more enclosure, that of Louis XV., a miserable wall of mud and dirt, worthy of the king who constructed it.

"What then was the aspect of the three towns, the city, the university, and the ville, viewed from the summit of the towers of Notre Dame in 1482? The spectator, on arriving breathless at that elevation, was dazzled by the chaos of roofs, chimneys, streets, bridges, belfries, towers, and steeples. All burst at once upon the eye-the carved gable, the sharp roof, the turret perched upon the angles of the walls, the stone pyramid of the eleventh century, the slated obelisk of the fifteenth, the round and naked keep of the castle, the square and embroidered tower of the church, the great and the small, the massive and the light. The eye was long bewildered amidst this labyrinth of heights and depths, in which there was nothing but had its originality, its reason, its genius, its beauty, nothing but issued from the hand of art, from the humblest dwelling, with its painted and carved wooden front, elliptical doorway, and overhanging stories, to the royal Louvre, which then had a colonnade of towers. But when the eye began to reduce this tumult of edifices to some kind of order, the principal masses that stood out from among them were these.

6

"To begin with the city. The island of the city,' says Sauval, who, amidst his frivolous gossip, has occasionally some good ideas, is shaped like a great ship, which hath taken ground, and is stuck fast in

the mud, nearly in the middle of the channel of the Seine.' We have already stated, that in the fifteenth century this ship was moored to the two banks of the river by five bridges; for it is to this circumstance that the ship blazoned in the ancient arms of Paris owes its origin. To those who can decipher it heraldry is an algebra, a language. The entire history of the second half of the Middle Ages is written in heraldry, as the history of the first half in the imagery of the Roman churches: 'tis but the hieroglyphics of the feudal system succeeding those of theocracy."

After describing the city, the writer proceeds: "the university brought the eye to a full stop. From one end to the other, it was an homogeneous, compact whole. Those thousand roofs, close, angular, adhering together, almost all composed of the same geometrical element, seen from above, presented the appearance of a crystallization of one and the same substance. The capricious ravines of the streets did not cut this pie of houses into too disproportionate slices. The forty-two colleges were distributed among them in a sufficiently equal manner. The curious and varied summits of these beautiful buildings were the production of the same art as the simple roofs which they overtopped; in fact, they were but a multiplication, by the square or the cube, of the same geometrical figure. They diversified the whole, therefore, without confusing it; they completed without overloading it. Geometry is a harmony. Some superb mansions too, made here and