s; top-boots and redingotes, as
we call riding-coats. Nay the very mode of riding: for now no man on a
level with his age but will trot a l'Anglaise, rising in the stirrups;
scornful of the old sitfast method, in which, according to Shakspeare,
'butter and eggs' go to market. Also, he can urge the fervid wheels,
this brave Chartres of ours; no whip in Paris is rasher and surer than
the unprofessional one of Monseigneur.

Elf jokeis, we have seen; but see now real Yorkshire jockeys, and what
they ride on, and train: English racers for French Races. These likewise
we owe first (under the Providence of the Devil) to Monseigneur. Prince
d'Artois also has his stud of racers. Prince d'Artois has withal
the strangest horseleech: a moonstruck, much-enduring individual,
of Neuchatel in Switzerland,--named Jean Paul Marat. A problematic
Chevalier d'Eon, now in petticoats, now in breeches, is no less
problematic in London than in Paris; and causes bets and lawsuits.
Beautiful days of international communion! Swindlery and Blackguardism
have stretched hands across the Channel, and saluted mutually: on the
racecourse of Vincennes or Sablons, behold in English curricle-and-four,
wafted glorious among the principalities and rascalities, an English Dr.
Dodd, (Adelung, Geschichte der Menschlichen Narrheit, para Dodd.)--for
whom also the too early gallows gapes.

Duke de Chartres was a young Prince of great promise, as young Princes
often are; which promise unfortunately has belied itself. With the huge
Orleans Property, with Duke de Penthievre for Father-in-law (and now the
young Brother-in-law Lamballe killed by excesses),--he will one day be
the richest man in France. Meanwhile, 'his hair is all falling out,
his blood is quite spoiled,'--by early transcendentalism of debauchery.
Carbuncles stud his face; dark studs on a ground of burnished copper. A
most signal failure, this young Prince! The stuff prematurely burnt out
of him: little left but foul smoke and ashes of expiring sensualities:
what might have been Thought, Insight, and even Conduct, gone now, or
fast going,--to confused darkness, broken by bewildering dazzlements; to
obstreperous crotchets; to activities which you may call semi-delirious,
or even semi-galvanic! Paris affects to laugh at his charioteering; but
he heeds not such laughter.

On the other hand, what a day, not of laughter, was that, when
he threatened, for lucre's sake, to lay sacrilegious hand on
the Palai