a grand social and political revolution has emancipated masses, It has set them to thinking. With much thought has it given much seriousness. It has opened to ambition a thousand new passages from the arena of frivolity and mere pleasure, passages that, however sombre, still conduct to light. If in the last fifty years have been added to this metropolis fifty grand central sources of pleasure, there have likewise been added fifty thousand topics of serious thought. I am near the truth in saying, that the French are a little less gay and far more serious than before 1789.

The love of music, so universal among the Parisians, is inspired into the children by the orchestra of their theatres-not simple mu, sic, but music extremely artificial. And here, too, I see generated much of that love of all the artificial which strongly prevails among the French. The theatre, here flourishing, is throughout a work of art. The pieces on the boards are artificial in an extraordinary degree, and require an artificial taste thoroughly to appreciate them. The children study combinations far from the simple, They look at very artificial dresses, very artificial scenery, and soon upon their eyes and hearts must pall what, in its mere sim. plicity, would to other children be enchanting. So far as the actors are concerned, there can be nothing more unnaturalizing than their assumption, their feigning of emotions which, at the time, are not real to their breasts. There was something in this extremely unpleasant to me at first. I saw before me children without the artlessness of childhood-children pretending to love, pretending to hate, counterfeiting hope and then despair. I saw them embodying virtues whereof they had little conception, and vices which only taint maturer years. And, identifying their feelings with those of the exhibitors, I saw hundreds of spectators as youthful as them. selves. Certainly there could be nothing devised more fitted to use up in young hearts their feeling for the pure, the simple, and true, than such theatrical representations.

That they tend to generate a love of parade and passion for plea. sure, I have hardly any doubt. The processions, the decorations, the military and courtly shows upon yonder small stage-what are they but pictures, in little, of real scenes upon a broader stage, for delighting in which, those young spectators are gradually and insensibly educating themselves? And now those rounds of appro bation showered down on Master Charles, for the kingly style in which, as Louis XIV., he proclaims, "I am the state," and on little Caroline, for the resistless manner wherewith she solicits a royal favor for a friend-be assured they have started or strengthened many a desire for mere applause in some hundred of those ambi. tious listeners. Among these feelings does vanity take root; and

when you tell me the French are the vainest people of the earth, I answer they ought to be so. The causes tending so to make them, are numerous indeed, and too powerful to be withstood. Vanity still, as of old, achieves laughable wonders in France, and peoples many a strange scene. Often it sends a corps to the Morgue, and now and then an accused to the Cour d'Assises, When Oursel and Fontelle were, last week, asked by the judge, why they sent anonymous letters to the Prefect of the Police, falsely implicating themselves of conspiracy against the king, the latter answered, it was done merely that they might be apprehended, and enjoy the eclat of a trial before the Chamber of Peers. Fontelle had made out his pompous defence in rhyme, and concluded one of the most ridiculous scenes I have ever witnessed in a court of Justice with these words "When actors do any thing well upon the stage, they are applauded. We have not talents for the theatre. But here we are objects of universal attention. We have got some. thing of our end. Ha, ha, ha!" and Ourrel joined the laugh, and Fontelle and Oursel walked triumphantly out of the Court-Room, I am not now going to accumulate evidences of the peculiarly wide and strong existence of this feeling among the French. I suggest one of its causes.

never come.

That these establishments, while they produce love of pleasure and disposition to be pleased, are likewise secret, and hardly traceable sources of that ennui which heavily bears on Parisian society, I firmly believe. In them life is half exhausted long before life's pleasurable springs have begun to flow. An old age of cards may be a worthy addition to a youth of follies, but a manhood and age of satiety, of disgust, of ennui, are natural results of an infancy and youth of high artificial excitement. A desire for enjoyment may be strong where the capacities for enjoying are half used up. In Paris there is a wide hankering for pleasure where pleasure may They who early fling away, or waste their patrimony of health and spirits, may well look forward to that destiny which awaits all moral and physical spendthrifts. Paris, the gayest metropolis of the world, is likewise the saddest. The city which hears the loudest langhter, likewise witnesses the greatest number of sui. cides. If vanity sends its thousands into courts and public spheres, mere weariness of life sends its hundreds to the Morgue. Last September was for Paris one of the gayest months of 1836. In that same month, in that same city, from many motives, but chiefly ennui, there were sixty-six suicides. What' other city of Europe, or the world, has a public show-room for its unknown dead? And who would imagine as at evening he walks through the brilliant arcades of the Palais Royal, amidst its ever-restless, laughing mul.

titudes, that he was moving amidst masses of vice and unhappiness to which no other scene can furnish a parallel? What Paris is to the world, the Palais Royal is to Paris. Here is centred the brilliancy, the vivacious life of the great metropolis, and likewise here in secret chambers are first cradles of its crime, its wretchedness, its despair. "Do you observe," said my companion, as this evening we walked along the Boulevards, "do you observe that mansion so brilliantly illuminated? It looks happy enough. I know its inmates. They are tame men and women, who long ago used up life. They go on vegetating now. They are as gloomy and triste as any thing you may see among the fallen aristocracy of the Faubourg St. Germaine. They are but the type of thousands."

The traits of character and conduct which I have in part traced up, not fancifully I hope, to these little centres of juvenile resort, are themselves, indeed, the effects of a hundred causes. The broad tide of French feeling, emotion, thought, opinion, as it flows in 1837, is made up of multitudinous tributary streams, whereof some have been running for ages, and some have commenced within the last fifty years; whereof some take their rise in depths and some upon the surface. I have sourced up only one of these streams to its fountain.

I have not yet spoken of the moral character of the dramas performed at these theatres. The tendencies above remarked upon, belong to them, whatever be the moral character of their representations. I am happy now to say that so far as my observation has extended, this character is not very exceptionable. It may with truth be said, that at all the great Parisian theatres, the passions put into action in the tragedies are generally of the worst description, while the comedies and vaudevilles are either based upon, or involve, a seduction. For the former, the horrors of the Grand Revolution have prepared Parisian audiences. The latter are faithful transcripts of present Parisian life. Into the children's theatres like pieces seldom go. Their dramas are light, unsubstantial; sel. dom are they immoral. The taint of the general spirit has not fouled them. In the midst of surrounding impurity, they generally remain pure. In this respect, I doubt not their tendency is good. And if the influences now working upon French society, as it passes from childhood into youth, and from youth into manhood, were so modified as to harmonize with the morality of these little plays, the social aspect of things would here be soon much changed.

In my observations upon these establishments, I trust I may not be charged with having given undue importance to insignificant mat. ters. I look at them only as a single wheel in a vast system of

social and moral influences. They are peculiar to this metropolis. The United States have them not. In no other part of Europe will you find any thing like them. For an explanation of what is peculiar in French character or society, its peculiar institutions must be questioned. My reader, who knows what great ends are wrought by small means;—who sees in the youth of a nation the image of its manhood;-who feels how often are life-decisive the impressions upon the young;-and who would judge of their future by some tendencies of their present, will hardly deem the hour wasted which is given to the Children's Theatres of Paris. J. J. J.

ENGLISH SCENERY.

BY GRENVILLE MELLEN.

I

THE Woods and vales of England! Is there not
A magic and a marvel in their names?
Is there not music in the memory

Of their old glory?—Is there not a sound,
As of some watch-word, that recalls at night
All that gave light and wonder to the day,
In these soft words that breathe of loveliness,
And summon to the spirit, scenes that rose
Rich on its raptured vision—as the eye
Hung like a tranced thing above the page
That Genius had made golden with its glow-
The page of noble story !—of high towers,
And castled halls, envista'd like the line
Of heroes and great hearts, that centuries
Had led before their hearths in dim array!-
Of lake and lawn-and grey and cloudy tree,
That rock'd with banner'd foliage to the storm
Above the walls it shadow'd-and whose leaves,
Rustling in gather'd music to the winds,

Seemed voic'd as with the sound of many seas!

II.

The woods and vales of England! O, the founts,,
The living founts of memory!-How they break
And gush upon my stirr'd heart as I gaze!
I hear the shout of reapers-the far low
Of herds upon the banks-the distant bark
Of the tir'd dog, stretch' at some cottage door-
The echo of the axe, 'mid forest swung-
And the loud laugh, drowning the faint halloo!

Land of our fathers!

III.

Though 'tis ours to roam-
A land upon whose bosom thou might'st lie
Like infant on its mother's !-though 'tis ours
To gaze upon a nobler heritage

Than thou could'st e'er unshadow to thy sons-
Though ours to linger upon fount and sky,
Wilder, and peopled with great spirits who
Walk with a deeper majesty than thine-
Yet, as our father-land-O, who shall tell
The lone, mysterious energy which calls
Upon our sinking spirits, to walk forth
Amid thy wood and mount—where every hill'
Is eloquent with beauty, and the tale
And song of centuries-the cloudless years,
When fairies walk'd thy vallies--and the turf
Rung to their tiny footsteps-and quick flowers
Sprang with the lifting grass mid which they trode !!
When all the landscape murmur'd to its rills,
And Joy with Hope slept in its leafy bowers!

New-York, May, 1837.

OLD HOUSES.

I LOVE an Old House. Even though its walls, battered and decayed, speak of nothing but poverty and toil, still there is something touching in the thought of the tide of human passions and human affections which have flowed through it; of the happy marriages, the joyous childhood, the cheerful age which it has sheltered; of the many spirits which it has beheld beginning the strife of being, which, after enduring the labor and heat of the longest of life's days, have gone to their eternal home, of whose existence not a single trace remains in any mind on earth. It is not necessary