employments, which are remarkable in the
English nation. During our residence in the south, we were invited by
the Countess de R---- to a ball, which, she told us, was given in honour
of her son's birth-day. We went accordingly, and were first received in
the card-rooms, which we found brilliantly lighted and decorated, and
full of company. We were then conducted into another handsome apartment
fitted up as a theatre. The curtain rose, and the young Count de R----
tripped lightly from behind the scenes, with the most complete
self-possession, and at the same time, with great elegance, begun a
little address to the audience, apologising for his inability to amuse
them as he could have wished, and concluded his address, by singing,
with a great deal of action, two French songs. He then skipped nimbly
off the stage and returned, leading in the principal actress at the
theatre here, M. de----. They performed together a little dramatic
interlude composed for the occasion; the company then adjourned into the
card-rooms, and the evening concluded by a ball. At another private
party we attended when the company were assembled; a folding door flew
open, and a party of ladies and gentlemen, fantastically drest as
shepherds and shepherdesses, flew into the room, and to our great
amusement, began acting with their pipes and crooks and garlands, and
all the paraphernalia of pastoral life, those employments of rural
labour, or scenes of rustic courtship, which, in their public
amusements, we have before remarked as peculiar favourites with the
French people.

If, as we have above remarked, for the hopes of the restoration of
truth, and honour, and principle, in France, we must turn to the lower
orders, it will not, I trust, be thought too trifling to observe, that
any thing like real excellence in music, another favourite national
propensity, is, as far as we could observe, to be found in the peasantry
alone. The music of the capital, the modern compositions performed at
the opera, the prevailing songs of the day, are all noisy, unmeaning,
unharmonious (I speak, of course, merely from personal feeling, and with
deference to those better able to form an opinion upon the subject;) but
it is impossible to hear the unharmonious crash which proceeds from the
orchestra of the opera, without immediately recollecting the celebrated
pun of Rosseau: "Pour l'Academie de musique, certainement il fait le
plus du bruit du monde." On the other han