ding
Bacchanal and Saturnal; 'tis agreed that we shall be everything that
is low. To conclude, we sup with Castijars, the most 'furiously
dishevelled' orgy that ever was known."

The rest of the letter is on matters of finance, equally curious and
instructive. But pause we for the present, to consider the fashionable
part: and caricature as it is, we have an accurate picture of the actual
French dandy. Bets, breakfasts, riding, dinners at the "Cafe de Paris,"
and delirious Carnival balls: the animal goes through all such frantic
pleasures at the season that precedes Lent. He has a wondrous respect
for English "gentlemen-sportsmen;" he imitates their clubs--their love
of horse-flesh: he calls his palefrenier a groom, wears blue birds's-eye
neck-cloths, sports his pink out hunting, rides steeple-chases, and has
his Jockey Club. The "tigers and lions" alluded to in the report have
been borrowed from our own country, and a great compliment is it to
Monsieur de Bernard, the writer of the above amusing sketch, that he has
such a knowledge of English names and things, as to give a Tory lord the
decent title of Lord Cobham, and to call his dog O'Connell. Paul de Kock
calls an English nobleman, in one of his last novels, Lord Boulingrog,
and appears vastly delighted at the verisimilitude of the title.

For the "rugissements et bondissements, bacchanale et saturnale, galop
infernal, ronde du sabbat tout le tremblement," these words give a most
clear, untranslatable idea of the Carnival ball. A sight more hideous
can hardly strike a man's eye. I was present at one where the four
thousand guests whirled screaming, reeling, roaring, out of the
ball-room in the Rue St. Honore, and tore down to the column in the
Place Vendome, round which they went shrieking their own music, twenty
miles an hour, and so tore madly back again. Let a man go alone to such
a place of amusement, and the sight for him is perfectly terrible:
the horrid frantic gayety of the place puts him in mind more of the
merriment of demons than of men: bang, bang, drums, trumpets, chairs,
pistol-shots, pour out of the orchestra, which seems as mad as the
dancers; whiz, a whirlwind of paint and patches, all the costumes under
the sun, all the ranks in the empire, all the he and she scoundrels of
the capital, writhed and twisted together, rush by you; if a man falls,
woe be to him: two thousand screaming menads go trampling over his
carcass: they have neither power nor