ut taking a ticket from a lady at a desk, nor indulge in a mild
polka, without being watched by a man in a cocked hat. If you change
your hotel, instant information must be sent to the Prefecture; if you
want to send a telegraphic message to England, it must first receive the
sanction of the Minister of Police; if you enter Paris from a country
walk, with a great-coat on your arm, you will be pounced upon and
searched at the Barriere. All this is disgusting to honest JOHN BULL,
and he curses it with great force of language. "Thank goodness!" says
he, "at all events, we are free from this miserable drilling, and
marshalling, and boarding-school discipline." In England we certainly
are.

Occasionally the London newspapers take the opportunity of an
"illustrious foreigner's" visit, to contrast our liberty and their
thraldom. The leading journal will point out with its usual epigrammatic
terseness, varied illustration, good sense and eloquence, the advantage
of letting people alone, and the extent to which our Government does let
us alone. "His Highness, or Majesty, as the case may be, will ride for
hours in our metropolis with out seeing a soldier or (especially if
there's a row) a policeman." Blessed independence! but the contrast is
much more striking, because more disagreeable to a wretched Englishmen,
born to freedom, who finds himself in a mess on the Continent--a
contingency which happens to one out of every dozen tourists. Those
confounded passports form the monster grievance. Accordingly from July
to November, not a week passes but some victim writes to complain that
he is in confinement at Marseilles or Como, or somewhere or another,
because his passport is lost or not _en regle_. Old JOLLYBOY, I
recollect, wrote a tremendous letter to the _Times_ containing a column
and a half of his adventures. It ought to have produced a
reconsideration of the whole passport system, but it didn't. Those
foreign governments are so dense!

And now little BOMBAZINE (who is "reading for the bar," like every young
fellow about town that is not in the army) comes to your Correspondent,
and complains of a grievance which throws all the foreign misdemeanours
into the shade. He went to the English Embassy to get his passport
signed, and _the man there could not speak English_! Now, by JOVE, HARRY
is right, and it is too bad! Here are we every day ridiculing or cursing
the villainous antiquated machinery of passports. We all know, and a