Europe took their station, when their armies passed in triumph through the walls of Paris. The view from the Pont Neuf, though not so striking upon the whole, embraces objects of greater individual beauty. The gay and animated quays of the city covered with foot-passengers, and with all the varied exhibitions of industrious occupation, which, from the warmth of the climate, are carried on in the open air;--the long and splendid front of the Louvre and Thuilleries;--the bold projection of the Palais des Arts, of the Hotel de la Monnaie, and other public buildings on the opposite side of the river;--the beautiful perspective of the bridges, adorned by the magnificent colonnade which fronts the Palace of the Legislative Body;--and the lofty picturesque buildings of the centre of Paris surrounding the more elevated towers of Notre Dame, form a scene, which, though less perfect, is more striking, and more characteristic, than the scene from the centre of the Place Louis Quinze, which has been just described. It conveys at once a general idea of the French capital; of that mixture of poverty and splendour by which it is so remarkably distinguished; of that grandeur of national power, and that degradation of individual importance, which marked the ancient dynasty of the French nation. It marks too, in a historical view, the changes of the public feeling which the people of this country have undergone, from the distant period when the towers of Notre Dame rose amidst the austerity of Gothic taste, and were loaded with the riches of Catholic superstition, to that boasted æra, when the loyalty of the French people exhausted the wealth and the genius of the country, to decorate with classic taste the residence of their Sovereigns; and lastly, to those later days, when the names of religion and of loyalty have alike been forgotten; when the national exultation reposed only on the trophies of military greatness, and the iron yoke of imperial power was forgotten in the monuments which record the deeds of imperial glory. To the general observation on the inferiority of the common buildings in Paris, there are some remarkable exceptions. The Boulevards, the remains of the ancient ramparts of the city, are in general beautiful, from their circular form, from their uniform breadth, from the magnificence of the detached palaces with which they abound, and from the rows of fine trees with which they are shaded. In the skirts of the town, and more especially in the Fauxbourg St Germain, the beauty of the streets is greatly increased by the detached hotels or villas, surrounded by gardens, which are everywhere to be met with, in which the lilac, the laburnum, the Bois de Judeé, and the acacia, grow in the most luxuriant manner, and on the green foliage of which the eye reposes with singular delight amidst the bright and dazzling whiteness of the stone with which they are surrounded.