Paris is delightful enough, as every one knows, to all who look at it, even with the superficial glance that seeks no farther than its external aspect at the present moment; but it would, I imagine, be interesting beyond all other cities of the modern world if carefully travelled through with a consummate antiquarian who had given enough learned attention to the subject to enable him to do justice to it. There is something so piquant in the contrasts offered by some localities between their present and their past conditions,--such records furnished at every corner, of the enormous greatness of the human animal, and his most _chétif_ want of all stability--traces of such wit and such weakness, such piety and profanation, such bland and soft politeness, and such ferocious barbarism,--that I do not believe any other page of human nature could furnish the like. I am sure, at least, that no British records could furnish pictures of native manners and native acts so dissimilar at different times from each other as may be found to have existed here. The most striking contrast that we can show is between the effects of Oliver Cromwell's rule and that of Charles the Second; but this was unity and concord compared to the changes in character which have repeatedly taken place in France. That this contrast with us was, speaking of the general mass of the population, little more than the mannerism arising from adopting the style of "the court" for the time being, is proved by the wondrously easy transition from one tone to the other which followed the restoration. This was chiefly the affair of courtiers, or of public men, who as necessarily put on the manners of their master as a domestic servant does a livery; but Englishmen were still in all essentials the same. Not so the French when they threw themselves headlong, from one extremity of the country to the other, into all the desperate religious wildness which marks the history of the Ligue; not so the French when from the worship of their monarchs they suddenly turned as at one accord and flew at their throats like bloodhounds. Were they then the same people?--did they testify any single trait of moral affinity to what the world thought to be their national character one short year before? Then again look at them under Napoleon, and look at them under Louis-Philippe. It is a great, a powerful, a magnificent people, let them put on what outward seeming they will; but I doubt if there be any nation in the world that would so completely throw out a theorist who wished to establish the doctrine of distinct races as the French.