but I did not know that the magnificent ranges of buildings, with their rich sculptures and Corinthian colonnades on my left, were those of the Garde Meuble; nor that the fine but short perspective by which they were separated was the Rue de la Concorde; nor that the handsome bridge on my right was the Pont de la Concorde, and the imposing portico which reared its lofty Corinthian columns beyond was the entrance to the Salle des Representatifs. Although ignorant of the names and destinations of the noble objects, I could not but be sensible of their effect individually and as an _ensemble_; and I did acknowledge that nothing could be more imposing, more strikingly magnificent, than this entrance to the city of Paris. Every faculty absorbed in the contemplation of the various and varied novelties around me, I progressed mechanically, and without knowing or seeking to know where I was going, found my way down the Rue de Rivoli, and so into the Place Vendome, where the column of Austerlitz, by its beautiful workmanship, and the historical recollections associated with it, arrested my course for some time. Strange, however, that a nation like France should borrow from Rome--that she could not produce an original idea to commemorate a great national triumph. It is nevertheless a superb monument; and at least the idea of using the guns taken in the battle to decorate the city--was not _that_ an original idea? The Place itself I do not like. Its houses are certainly fine, and uniformly built, but the style is heavy, the material dismal, and the want of _trottoirs_ gives the whole the air of a “mews.” In approaching the Place Vendome by the Rue Castiglione, I crossed the Rue St Honoré, the busy stream flowing along which would have induced me to follow it, but the column in front drew me forward like a magnet. The streets of Paris are infinitely more amusing than those of London, inasmuch as they everywhere teem with animation, from the pavements to the roofs. Nowhere do we meet such long, tiresome, dull avenues of brick and mortar as Baker Street, Gore Street, Gloucester Place, &c. In London, “home’s home,” &c.--and when people are at home, they like quietude and retirement. In Paris _au contraire_, people cannot exist in quietude, and solitude is abominated. To see and be seen seems the universal maxim. The varied forms of the houses, too, and the still more varied styles of ornament, render the streets much more picturesque and interesting in Paris than in London. There is something very picturesque and interesting, I think, in the immense long perspectives between the tall houses of such streets as the Rue de Richelieu, into which I was led by the Rue Neuve des Petits Champs. This is the Bond Street of Paris, and is a most amusing one. Here every thing savoured of the fashionable world. Shops of a more respectable description richly decorated; goods of the most costly kind arranged for display with a very superior degree of taste and even elegance.