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repeat French prayers.[10] When Palais Royal vice subsides,[11] (Who plays there's a complete ass--) When footpaths grow on highway sides[12]-- Then! then's the Aurea-Aetas! There, France, I leave thee.--Jean Taureau![13] What think'st thou of thy neighbours? Or (what I own I'd rather know) What--think'st thou of MY LABOURS? A TRAVELLER OF 1827, (W. P.) _Carshalton_. [2] "Which, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along"--POPE. [3] It is, indeed, difficult to avoid one, call it what you will, and quite as difficult to find a more absurd name than that adopted, unless, indeed, (why the machine goes but five miles an hour,) it is called a diligence from not being diligent, as the speaker of our House of Commons may be so designated from not speaking. It consists of three bodies, carries eighteen inside, and is not unfrequently drawn by nine horses. A cavalry charge, therefore, could scarcely make more noise. Hence, and from the other circumstance, its association in the second stanza with the triune sonorous Cerberus. A diligence indeed! [4] The intrusive garrulity of French waiters at dinner is notorious. [5] This "sea Mediterranean" is a most filthy, fetid, uncovered gutter, running down the middle of the most, even of the best streets, and with which every merciless Jehu most liberally bespatters the unhappy pedestrian. Truly _la belle nation_ has little idea of decency, or there would be subterranean sewers like ours. [6] French houses are cleaner even than ours externally, being all neatly whitewashed! _mais le dedans! le dedans!_ [7] The servants are as notorious for their incivility as for their intrusive loquacity. [8] As Scott well observes in the introduction to Waverley, "the word comfortable is peculiar to the English language." The thing is certainly peculiar to us, if the word is not. [9] All the tragedies are in rhyme, and that of the very worst description for elocutionary effect. It is the anapestic, like, as Hannah More remarks, "A cobbler there was, and he lived in a stall!" [10] It is scarcely necessary to remark, that the absurdity (exploded in England at the Reformation) of a Latin liturgy still obtains in France. [11] The Palais Royal! that pandemonium of profligacy! whose gaming table
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