The great statute, "tit-for-tat," is, I believe, equally the law of all nations; besides, love is a great leveller of distinction, and it is in this levelling mission that it performs some of its most ridiculous antics. When a rich man's daughter runs off with her father's coachman, as occasionally happens, the whole country is in a roar of laughter about it. There is an innate, popular perception of the ridiculous, but everybody sees and feels that in such cases it is misplaced and grotesque. Everyone perceives that the woman's heart has taken the bit in its mouth, and run away with her brains. But, as comedy is often nearly allied to tragedy, so sorrow is sure to come as soon as the little honeymoon is over. This romantic love cannot flourish in the soil of poverty and want. Indeed, all the stimulants which pride and luxury can administer to it can hardly keep it alive. The rich miss who runs away with a man far beneath her in education and refinement must inevitably awake, after a brief dream, to a state of things which have made her unfortunate for life; and he, poor man, will not be less wretched, unless she has brought him sufficient money to give him leisure and opportunity to indulge his fancies with that society which is on a level with his own tastes and education. WITS AND WOMEN OF PARIS The French wits tell a laughable story of an untravelled Englishman who, on landing at Calais, was received by a sulky red-haired hostess, when he instantly wrote down in his note-book: "All French women are sulky and red-haired." We never heard whether this Englishman afterwards corrected his first impressions of French women, but quite likely he never did, for there is nothing so difficult on earth as for an Englishman to get over first impressions, and especially is this the case in relation to everything in France. An aristocratic Englishman may live years in Paris without really knowing anything about it. In the first place, he goes there with letters of introduction to the Faubourg St. Germain, where he finds only the fossil remains of the old _noblesse_, intermixed with a slight proportion of the actual intelligence of the country, and here he moves round in the stagnant circles of historical France, and it is a wonder if he gets so much as a glimpse of the living progressive Paris. There is nothing on earth, unless it be a three-thousand-year-old mummy, that is so grim and stiff and shrivelled, as the pure old French nobility. France is at present the possessor of three separate and opposing nobilities. First, there is the nobility of the Empire, the Napoleonic nobility, which is based on military and civil genius; second, there is the Orleans nobility, the family of the late Louis-Philippe, represented in the person of the young Comte de Paris; third, the Legitimists, or the old aristocracy of the Bourbon stock, represented in the person of Henry V, Duc de Bordeaux, now some fifty years old, and laid snugly away in exile in Italy.