ot fatigue the eye and ear. Even the
pell-mell frolics of St. Cloud were better idealities of enjoyment, than
the splendid promenade of Vauxhall, in the days of its olden celebrity;
for diamonds and feathers are often mere masquerade finery in such
scenes--so distant are the heads and hearts of their wearers.[6]

[6] We are not permitted to allude to the fete of St. Cloud as a
scene of _pastoral_ amusement, or of the primitive simplicity
which is associated with that epithet. The French are not a
pastoral people, although they are not less so than the English;
neither are the suburbs of a metropolis rural life. They are too
near the pride of human art for pastoral pleasures, and no
aristocracy is more infested with little tyrants than the
neighbourhood of great cities, the oppressors being too timid to
trust themselves far out of the verge of public haunts, in the
midst of which they would be equally suspicious.

Amusements are at all times among the best indications of
national character; a truth which the ancients seem to have
exaggerated into their maxim _in vino veritas_. Here the
national comparison is not "odious." Three Sunday fairs are held
within six miles of Paris, in a park, as was once the custom at
Greenwich: the latter, though a royal park, does not boast of
the residence of royalty, as does St Cloud. The objection to the
day of the French fetes is cleared by another argument. But what
would be the character of a week-day fair, or fete, in
Kensington Gardens? The intuitive answer will make the moral
observer regret that man should so often place the interdict on
his own happiness, and then peevishly repine at his uncheery
lot.

Night, with her poetic glooms, only served to heighten the lustre of the
fairy fete; and as I receded through the wood, the little shoal of light
gleamed and twinkled through "branches overgrown," and the distant
sounds began to fall into solitary silence--even saddening to
meditation--so fast do the dying glories of festive mirth sink into
melancholy--till at once, with the last gleam and echo, I found myself
in a pleasant little glade on the brow of the hill. The day had been
unusually hot--all was hushed stillness. But the darkening clouds were
fast gathering into black masses:--

The rapid lightning flames along the sky.
What terrible event does this portend?

The stifling heat