igh arcade, under which the hotels,
the principal shops, and the lounging citizens are gathered. The shops,
are probably better than the Turinese, but the people are not so good.
Stunted, shabby, rather vitiated looking, they have none of the personal
richness of the sturdy Piedmontese; and I will take this occasion to
remark that in the course of a journey of several weeks in the French
provinces I rarely encountered a well-dressed male. Can it be possible
that republics are unfavourable to a certain attention to one's boots
and one's beard? I risk this somewhat futile inquiry because the
proportion of neat coats and trousers seemed to be about the same in
France and in my native land. It was notably lower than in England and
in Italy, and even warranted the supposition that most good provincials
have their chin shaven and their boots blacked but once a week. I hasten
to add, lest my observation should appear to be of a sadly superficial
character, that the manners and conversation of these gentlemen bore
(whenever I had occasion to appreciate them) no relation to the state of
their chin and their boots. They were almost always marked by an extreme
amenity. At Toulouse there was the strongest temptation to speak to
people simply for the entertainment of hearing them reply with that
curious, that fascinating accent of the Languedoc, which appears to
abound in final consonants and leads the Toulousians to say _bien-g_ and
_maison-g_ like Englishmen learning French. It is as if they talked with
their teeth rather than with their tongue. I find in my note-book a
phrase in regard to Toulouse which is perhaps a little ill-natured, but
which I will transcribe as it stands: "The oddity is that the place
should be both animated and dull. A big, brown-skinned population,
clattering about in a flat, tortuous town, which produces nothing
whatever that I can discover. Except the church of Saint-Sernin and the
fine old court of the Hotel d'Assezat, Toulouse has no architecture; the
houses are for the most part of brick, of a greyish-red colour, and have
no particular style. The brickwork of the place is in fact very
poor--inferior to that of the North Italian towns and quite wanting in
the wealth of tone which this homely material takes on in general in the
climates of dampness and greenness." And then my note-book goes on to
narrate a little visit to the Capitol, which was soon made, as the
building was in course of repair and half t