'On trouve ici le jeu, les livres, la musique, Les cigarres, l'amour, les orangers, Le monde tantot gai, tantot melancholique, Les glaces, la danse, et les cochers; De la biere, de bons diners, A cote d'arbre une boutique, Et la vue de hauts rochers. Ma foi!' 'We find here gambling, books, and music, Cigars, love-making, orange-trees; People or gay or melancholic, Ices, dancing, and coachmen, if you please; Beer, and good dinners; besides these, Shops where they sell not _on tic;_ And towering rocks one ever sees.' 'How shall I describe,' says Mr Whitelocke, 'to my readers in language sufficiently graphic, one of the resorts the most celebrated in Europe; a place, if not competing with Crockford's in gorgeous magnificence and display, at least surpassing it in renown, and known over a wider sphere? The metropolitan pump-room of Europe, conducted on the principle of gratuitous admittance to all bearing the semblance of gentility and conducting themselves with propriety, opens its Janus doors to all the world with the most laudable hospitality and with a perfect indifference to exclusiveness, requiring only the hat to be taken off upon entering, and rejecting only short jackets, cigar, pipe, and meerschaum. A room of this description, a temple dedicated to fashion, fortune, and flirtation, requires a pen more current, a voice more eloquent, than mine to trace, condense, vivify, and depict. Taking everything, therefore, for granted, let us suppose a vast saloon of regular proportions, rather longer than broad, at either end garnished by a balcony; beneath, doors to the right and left, and opposite to the main entrance, conduct to other apartments, dedicated to different purposes. On entering the eye is at once dazzled by the blaze of lights from chandeliers of magnificent dimensions, of lamps, lustres, and sconces. The ceiling and borders set off into compartments, showered over with arabesques, the gilded pillars, the moving mass of promenaders, the endless labyrinth of human beings assembled from every region in Europe, the costly dresses, repeated by a host of mirrors, all this combined, which the eye conveys to the brain at a single glance, utterly fails in description. As with the eye, so it is with the ear; at every step a new language falls upon it, and every tongue with different intonation, for the high and the low, the prince, peer, vassal, and tradesman, the proud beauty, the decrepit crone, some fresh budding into the world, some standing near the grave, the gentle and the stern, the sombre and the gay, in short, every possible antithesis that the eye, ear, heart can perceive, hear, or respond to, or that the mind itself can imagine, is here to be met with in two minutes. And yet all this is no Babel; for all, though concentrated, is admirably void of confusion; and evil or strong passions, if they do exist, are religiously suppressed--a