Paris, which Villiers was destined twice to revisit under circumstances very dissimilar to those of his first residence there, was then the resort of foreigners. The youth, who had emerged from the quiet haunts of Goadby Grange, took his first lessons in life in the city which Howell, in his familiar letters, styles, the “huge magazine of men.” “Its buildings,” says that writer, “were indifferently fair; its streets as foul during all the four seasons of the year; a perpetual current of coaches, carts, and horses encumbering them, narrow and dirty as they were, and were sometimes so entangled that it was an hour or more before they could proceed. In such a stop,” as Howell terms it, “was Ravaillac‘s fatal opportunity afforded, and the great Henry slain.”[35] The plague[36] settled perpetually in one corner or another of Paris, but Villiers escaped that risk; he returned, apparently exempt from foreign vices, unscathed by a more fearful contagion than the plague; at least, thus may we infer from the assertion of Sir Henry Wotton. “He came home,” says that writer, “in his natural plight, without affected forms, the ordinary disease of travellers.”[37] It may reasonably be presumed that the young man who retains his simplicity of deportment, still possesses a corresponding integrity of character. Footnote 35: “Howell’s Familiar Letters,” p. 39. Footnote 36: It is as well to remind the reader that before the year 1752, the civil or legal year began on the 25th of March (Lady Day), while the historical year began on the 1st of January, for civilians called each day within that period one year earlier than historians. The alteration in the calendar took place by Act of Parliament, on the 2nd day of September, 1752, when it was enacted that the day following should be the 14th instead of the 3rd of September.—“Nicolas’s Notitia Historica.” Footnote 37: Reliquiæ Wottonianæ, p. 209.