_Arc de Triomphe de l'Etoile._--It is no small adventure, in a burning day of a French summer, to walk the length of the Champs Elysées, even to see the arch of the Star, (Napoleon's _Star_,) and climb to its summit. Yet this labour I accomplished with the fervour and the fatigue of a pilgrimage. Why should the name of Republic be ever heard in the mouth of a Frenchman? All the objects of his glory in the Capital of which he _glories_, everything that he can show to the stranger--everything that he recounts, standing on tip-toe, and looking down on the whole world besides--is the work of monarchy! The grand Republic left nothing behind but the guillotine. The Bourbons and Buonapartes were the creators of all to which he points, with an exaltation that throws earth into the shade from the Alps to the Andes. The Louvre, the Madeleine, the Tuilleries, the Hôtel de Ville, (now magnified and renovated into the most stately of town-houses,) the Hôtel des Invalides, Nôtre Dame, &c. &c. are all the work of Kings. If Napoleon had lived half a century longer, he would have made Paris a second Babylon. If the very clever President, who has hitherto managed France so dexterously, and whose name so curiously combines the monarchy and the despotism,--if Louis _Napoleon_ (a name which an old Roman would have pronounced an omen) should manage it into a Monarchy, we shall probably see Paris crowded with superb public edifices. The kings of France were peculiarly magnificent in the decoration of the entrances to their city. As no power on earth can prevent the French from crowding into hovels, from living ten families in one house, and from appending to their cities the most miserable, ragged, and forlorn-looking suburbs on the globe, the monarchs wisely let the national habits alone; and resolved, if the suburbs must be abandoned to the popular fondness for the wigwam, to impress strangers with the stateliness of their gates. The _Arc de St Denis_, once conducting from the most dismal of suburbs, is one of the finest portals in Paris, or in any European city; it is worthy of the Boulevard, and that is panegyric at once. Every one knows _that it was_ erected in honour of the short-lived inroad of Louis XIV. into Holland in 1672, and the taking of whole muster-rolls of forts and villages, left at his mercy, ungarrisoned and unprovisioned, by the Republican parsimony of the Dutch, till a princely defender arose, and the young Stadtholder sent back the coxcomb monarch faster than he came. But the Arc is a noble work, and its architecture might well set a redeeming example to the London _improvers_. Why not erect an arch in Southwark? Why not at all the great avenues to the capital? Why not, instead of leaving this task to the caprices, or even to the bad taste of the railway companies, make it a branch of the operations of the Woods and Forests, and ennoble all the entrances of the mightiest capital of earthly empire?