Mr Henry Bulwer remarked in 1834

You no longer see in France that noble air, that great manner, as it was called, by which the old nobility strove to keep up the distinction between themselves and their worse-born associates-that manner is gone, and the French, far from being a polite people, want that easiness of behaviour which is the first essential to politeness.'

M. Janin remarked a few months ago :

I am no great admirer of the young men in Paris: I find them idle, self-conceited, full of vanity, and poor; they have too little time, and too little money, to bestow upon elegance and pleasure, to be either graceful or passionate in their excesses. Besides this, they are brought up with very little care, and are perfectly undecided between good and evil, justice and injustice, passing easily from one extreme to the other; to-day prodigals, to-morrow misers; to-day republicans, to-morrow royalists. At the present time, the Parisian youth, usually so courteous to ladies, cares for nothing but horses and smoking. It is the height of French fashion not to speak to women, not to bow to them, and scarcely to make way for them when they pass."

The cause of the change is obvious enough. Good breeding has been well described as the art of rendering to all what is socially their due; but, beyond the precincts of the noble Fauxbourg, there is no admitted criterion for determining what is socially due to any one in France; and where all are striving to be the equals of their superiors, or the superiors of their equals, the prevalent tone must be one of uneasy, dissatisfied, restless, pushing pretension. If a young Frenchman be somebody, there is a slight chance of his preserving an inoffensive deportment; if he be nobody, he invariably takes credit for what he may become, and his insolence is as unbounded as his expectations. Even the Tuileries, where one would expect rudeness to be suppressed by the genius of the place, has witnessed curious scenes since the Citizen-King became its lord. An instance is related by M. Janin. I am told that one day when M. Dupin ainé was with the King, he struck Louis Philippe's shoulder, upon which the King, who is about as great a lord as M. de Talleyrand, said, 'pointing to the door, "Sortez." M. Dupin did go out, but the next day he was at the King's petit levée, humbly asking after his majesty's health.' As the story was originally told, the King said Sortez de chez moi,' and M. Dupin refused to go out, on the ground that he was not chez the king, but chez the nation.

We will give another instance. In the course of his speech on the Regency Bill last year, M. Thiers, describing the implied contract between the nation and the throne, made the nation address the reigning dynasty in this manner: Voilà à quelles conditions légales nous vous appartenons comme sujets respec

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'tueux.' It is difficult to give a notion of the tumult that ensued, though we were present and witnessed it. The Extreme Left rose as one man: 'Nous ne sommes pas sujets, nous ne 'voulons pas être sujets ;' and M. Arago exclaimed at the pitch of his voice, Nous ne sommes les sujets de personne. C'est du Montalivet tout pur. Nous ne sommes pas sujets; nous nous appartenons à nous-mêmes !' Even a voice or two from the Centre suggested that the expression was too strong, and M. Thiers was obliged to change it into sujets de la loi."

This is not the calm confidence of a great and free nation reposing on its strength; and whilst such a spirit is to be found in great men and high places, it will be vain to look for ease, dignity, self-respect, becoming deference, or mutual forbearance, in society.

There yet remains a test on which we should like to dwell a little-the state of opinion regarding the war. The folly and wickedness of desolating indiscriminately the finest regions of the earth, destroying commerce, paralysing industry, setting up false standards of honour, encouraging every baneful passion, and checking every good impulse-this is now felt and acknowledged in every civilized community; with the exception of the one which arrogates to itself the title of the most civilized. Paris is converting her promenades into ramparts, just as other capitals have converted their ramparts into promenades; and the mass of her population are panting for the moment when, with an impregnable fastness to fall back upon in case of accidents, they may lay their peaceably-disposed neighbours under contribution, and haply wipe away the recollection of Waterloo. But this is too serious a subject to be cursorily or incidentally discussed; and we will conclude by saying that we have no national prejudices ourselves, nor any wish to foster them in others. Our remarks refer principally, if not exclusively, to the surface-to the forward, noisy, offensive, obtrusive portions of society; and though these have been allowed an undue prominence of late years, we are well aware that, in a capital like Paris, there is, and always must be, a quiet under current of good feeling and good sense, which will eventually carry off the folly and the froth.

ART. VI.-1. Life in Mexico during a Residence of Two Years in that Country. By MADAME CALDERON DE LA BARCA. 8vo. London: 1843.

2. Travels in the Great Western Prairies, the Anahuac and Rocky Mountains, and in the Oregon Territory. By THOMAS J. FARNHAM. 2 vols. 8vo. London: 1843.

MAD ADAME CALDERON DE LA BARCA, the authoress of the very entertaining volume first mentioned above, is, as we are informed, a Scottish lady, bred in New England, and married to a Spaniard, with whom she was domiciled for two years as Ambassadress in Mexico-a curious combination of personal accidentsnor would it be easy to conceive any more favourable, as regards shrewdness, situation, and opportunities, for bringing us acquainted with the fashions of social life in that secluded part of the world. Her book has all the natural liveliness, and tact, and readiness of remark, which are sure to distinguish the first production of a clever woman; while she has really much to tell, and the stores of some years of quiet accumulation to unfold. Would we could say that these delicate qualities survived the first contact with the public in one case in a hundred! Never was traveller better qualified for such a task in such a country, as far as physical resources, courage, and curiosity could go. Her feats of personal strength fill us with amazement. Morning visits and balls all night-rides on horseback and muleback, in straw-hat and reboso, Mexican fashion, of fourteen leagues a-day-journeys for a week together by diligence, with a running accompaniment of robbers-rattling at full gallop for days and nights, over dikes and ditches, through roaring streams, and over savage barrancas, in Charles the Tenth's old coach, borrowed by the Ambassador of a native who bought it a bargain from some speculating Frenchman-exploring caves, waterfalls, and mountains, in the intervals, and joining in every sort of dissipation which a Mexican season will furnish,all this seems the lady's very element, and gone through with a hearty honest good-will, which makes the reader long to have been of her party. Her curiosity is as prodigious as her powers of endurance. The slightest peep of a lion' is enough to place her on thorns until she has fairly hunted him down. Not a procession within her reach, in this procession-loving countryfrom the most grotesque religious farce enacted in some village near Mexico, up to the grand Holy Thursday of the capital,

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which she does not delight in seeing out from beginning to end. On the latter occasion she seems to have visited half the churches in the city to see the illuminations, and knelt before every altar in each, until, at length, our feet,' says she, seemed to move 'mechanically, and we dropped on our knees before each altar ' like machines touched by a spring.' The news of a nun about to take the veil never fails to draw her out; and the more painfully exciting the ceremony, the more eager her desire to catch a glimpse of the next victim. Convents, prisons, schools, theatres, mines, factories, nothing that can be ، seen,' in traveller's phrase, is too dull or too old, too quiet or too public for her. When she has nothing else to do, she can visit, again and again, the few ruinous old public buildings which form the stock sights of foreign street-loungers in Mexico. But any thing like a funcion as the Spaniards call it, is irresistible. She goes with equal delight to gambling fêtes, cock-fights, and bull-fights, to moralize, and have a peep at the dresses. As to the last, indeed, her confession is of the frankest:- Though at first I covered my face, and could not look, little by little I grew so much interested in the scene that I could not take my eyes off it, and I can easily understand the pleasure taken in these barbarous diversions by those accustomed to them from childhood.'

Nor are we at last at all surprised in having to accompany her, admission having been procured by certain means, private but powerful,' to the desagravios or nightly penance in the church of Saint Augustin-a grand disciplining match in the dark, performed by a hundred and fifty gentlemen penitents; concluding the evening's entertainments at ، the house of the minister, where there was a reunion, and where I found the company com'fortably engaged in eating a very famous kind of German salad, ، composed of herrings, smoked salmon, cold potatoes, and apples, and drinking hot punch.'

The vividness of this clever writer's colouring has brought her, we find, under the suspicions of those sapient critics who make a point of disbelieving wonderful stories about countries of which they know nothing. Some have gone so far as to pronounce her work altogether an article of fictitious manufacture -Paris-made, we believe. A more genuine book, in air as well as reality, it would be difficult to find. True, there is a love of romance about her, which runs into the superlative on most occasions; and probably her best stories, and finest descriptions, are precisely those which require the greatest allowances on the part of the sober-minded reader; but never yet were travels worth reading, the author of which had not some propensity towards the exercise of the traveller's privilege.

We must confess, for our own parts, to a great predisposition to what may be called romance, in all matters that relate to this strange portion of the earth-rich in the wonders of nature, and with a history unlike all others. All which attracts and astonishes in other regions, seems combined in one grand theatre in the Mexican isthmus. Humboldt, the most imaginative of travellers, was the first who caught the peculiar enchantment of the place, and tinged his descriptions with the colouring of his own enthusiastic turn for recondite speculations, historical and scientific. Scarcely a day's journey can be taken without some striking change, such as in other parts of the world one must traverse oceans to experience. There are the high table-lands, with a sky ever pure, bright, and keen, almost to the extreme, and so blue as almost to dazzle the eyes even in the moonlight'-abounding in every production of European industry, strangely mingled with some of the hardier forms of tropical vegetation; a land where every deserted garden is overrun with fruit-trees and flowers, imported by the Spaniards in other days, and now mingling with the weeds of the soil. You travel a few hours, ascend and descend over a rugged chain clad with pine and oak, and embellished with 'crosses' to denote the blood that has been shed in its solitudes; or across a tract of glassy glades, a natural park, with clumps of trees, in which the deer dwell unmolested; or a black burnt field of ferruginous lava; and find yourself in some rich valley, amidst chirimoyas, bananas, and granadillas, the fields smiling with magnificent crops of sugar and coffee-you are in the temperate zone, 'tierra templada. Another step, and you are in an Arabian desert-a level region of sand and palm groves. You rise again, and are speedily amongst the clouds, in the vast mother-chain of porphyry and trachite, the sierra madre' which intersects the land; miner's huts, villages, and cities, perched on the mountain sides, amidst ravines and waterfalls, or embosomed in leagues on leagues of waving pine forests,

That fluctuate when the storms of Eldorado sound;' while every where, for hundreds of miles, the snowy cones of the three great volcanoes, shining at sunset above the violet, gold, and purple tints which colour the lower ridges, seem as the landmarks of all the choicest and most beautiful district for if you wish to live in the Indies, says the Spanish proverb, let it be in sight of the volcanoes :

6 Si a morar en Indias quieres,

Que sea donde los volcanos veyres.'

Over all this variegated country are scattered the remnants of an ancient and mysterious civilization, together with the fast