I Am Told That Many Of The Farmers Have Become
Proselytes Of The League.
The League is a powerful and prodigiously
numerous association, with ample and increasing funds, publishing able
tracts, supporting well-conducted journals, and holding crowded public
meetings, which are addressed by some of the ablest speakers in the United
Kingdom.
I attended one of these at Covent Garden. Stage, pit, boxes, and
gallery of that large building were filled with one of the most
respectable-looking audiences, men and women, I have ever seen. Among the
speakers of the evening were Cobden and Fox. Cobden in physiognomy and
appearance might almost pass for an American, and has a certain New
England sharpness and shrewdness in his way of dealing with a subject. His
address was argumentative, yet there was a certain popular clearness about
it, a fertility of familiar illustration, and an earnest feeling, which
made it uncommonly impressive. Fox is one of the most fluent and ingenious
speakers I ever heard in a popular assembly. Both were listened to by an
audience which seemed to hang on every word that fell from their lips.
The musical world here are talking about Colman's improvement in the
piano. I have seen the instrument which the inventor brought out from
America. It is furnished with a row of brass reeds, like those of the
instrument called the Seraphine. These take up the sound made by the
string of the piano, and prolong it to any degree which is desired. It is
a splicing of the sounds of one instrument upon another. Yet if the
invention were to be left where it is, in Colman's instrument, it could
not succeed with the public. The notes of the reeds are too harsh and
nasal, and want the sweetness and mellowness of tone which belong to the
string of the piano.
At present the invention is in the hands of Mr. Rand, the portrait
painter, a countryman of ours, who is one of the most ingenious
mechanicians in the world. He has improved the tones of the reeds till
they rival, in softness and fullness, those of the strings, and, in fact,
can hardly be distinguished from them, so that the sounds of the two
instruments run into one another without any apparent difference. Mr. Rand
has contrived three or four different machines for making the reeds with
dispatch and precision; and if the difficulty of keeping the strings,
which are undergoing a constant relaxation, in perfect unison with the
reeds can be overcome, I see nothing to prevent the most complete and
brilliant success.
Letter XXVII.
Changes in Paris.
Paris, _August_ 9, 1845.
My last letter was dated at London, in my passage across England. I have
been nearly a fortnight in Paris. In ten years I find a considerable
change in the external aspect of this great capital. The streets are
cleaner, in many of them sidewalks have been made, not always the widest
to be sure, but smoothly floored with the asphaltum of Seyssel, which
answers the purpose admirably; the gutters have been removed from the
middle of the street to the edge of the curbstone, and lately the
curbstone has been made to project over them, so that the foot-passengers
may escape the bespattering from carriage-wheels which he would otherwise
be sure to get in a rainy day, and there are many such days in this
climate - it has rained every day but one since I entered France.
New passages have been cut from street to street, old streets have been
made wider, new streets have been made, with broad sidewalks, and stately
rows of houses hewn from the easily wrought cream-colored stone of the
quarries of the Seine. The sidewalks of the Boulevards, and all the
public squares, wherever carriages do not pass, have been covered with
this smooth asphaltic pavement, and in the Boulevards have been erected
some magnificent buildings, with richly carved pilasters and other
ornaments in relief, and statues in niches, and balconies supported by
stone brackets wrought into bunches of foliage. New columns and statues
have been set up, and new fountains pour out their waters. Among these is
the fountain of Moliere, in the Rue Richelieu, where the effigy of the
comic author, chiseled from black marble, with flowing periwig and
broad-skirted coat, presides over a group of naked allegorical figures in
white marble, at whose feet the water is gushing out.
In external morality also, there is some improvement; public gaming-houses
no longer exist, and there are fewer of those uncleanly nuisances which
offend against the code of what Addison calls the lesser morals. The
police have had orders to suppress them on the Boulevards and the public
squares. The Parisians are, however, the same gay people as ever, and as
easily amused as when I saw them last. They crowd in as great numbers to
the opera and the theatres; the Boulevards, though better paved, are the
same lively places; the guingettes are as thronged; the public gardens are
as full of dancers. In these, as at the New Tivoli, lately opened at
Chateau Rouge in the suburbs, a broad space made smooth for the purpose is
left between tents, where the young grisettes of Paris, married and
unmarried, or in that equivocal state which lies somewhere between, dance
on Sunday evening till midnight.
At an earlier hour on the same day, as well as on other days, at old
Franconi's Hippodrome, among the trees, just beyond the triumphal arch of
Neuilly, imitations of the steeple chase, with female riders who leap over
hedges, and of the ancient chariot-races with charioteers helmeted and
mailed, and standing in gilt tubs on wheels, are performed in a vast
amphiteatre, to a crowd that could scarcely have been contained in the
Colosseum of Home.
I have heard since I came here, two or three people lamenting the physical
degeneracy of the Parisians. One of them quoted a saying from a report of
Marshal Soult, that the Parisian recruits for the army of late years were
neither men nor soldiers.
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