304 Paragraphs from a Traveller's Portfolio. []Sept. 



produced in but one vineyard, and the vineyard produces but a few 

 pipes. But we have the same dexterity in ahnost every thing connected 

 with the pubHc subsistence. The utmost importation of tea at the 

 India House, is thirty miUions of pounds ; a couple of miUions more 

 may be allowed for smuggling, and this is scarcely more than but a pound 

 and a half each for the consumption of the twenty milhons of British and 

 Irish, in a year I all of whom, with scarcely an exception, drink tea, 

 morning and evening. 



The art of supplying the deficiencies of nature has descended even to 

 mushrooms. I remember a Parisian maker of catsup saying, on being 

 asked how he managed his manufacture in a peculiarly bad mushroom 

 season, " Sir, I should know little of my j)rq/ession if I could not make 

 catsup tvilhoul mushrooms." 



What a volume of meaning a few words may convey. The whole 

 reckless spirit of the French revolution was told in the Jacobin's answer 

 to the man who reproached France with the massacres of 1793. 

 " Croyez voiis done. Monsieur, qii'on fasse des revolutions avcc de I'eau 

 de rose." 



None of our European sketches of character ever exceeded the.keenness 

 of an Arab peasant's description of his neighbouring town. " It has 

 three kinds of people," said he, "bad Turks, bad Arabs, and bad 

 Christians. Three devils were sent to take the three to hell lately^ and 

 they were immediately found out by their quietness." 



The south of France has been ridiculously overpraised, and all the 

 romance of vineyards, orange-grower , and mountains covered with lilies 

 and roses, now live only in the rhymes of the Delia Cruscan school. 

 Even a " gentleman's gentleman," for all those fellows now contrive to 

 make the tour of Europe — (Forbin, the French count and dilettante, 

 has 7iever recovered the shock of seeing an English nursery-maid in a 

 straw bonnet and London-made pelisse, reading a novel of the Minerva 

 press at the foot of the Great Pyramid !) — every one of those valets, 

 who daily advertise that " they have no objection to travel," knows that 

 the best French vineyard in its best days looks like a wilderness of 

 gooseberry bushes, and in its worst, like a decayed turnip-field ; that the 

 orano-e-grove never is a. grove, but a scattering of stumpy trees ; and that, 

 for nine months in the year, it would be as easy to find the crown of 

 Barataria on a French mountain, as either lily or rose. 



Yet where there are mountains on which Frenchman has never laid a 

 finger, and which Nature, a much better gardener, has taken into her 

 own hand ; from time to time, even France herself, one of the ugliest 

 countries under the sun, makes a figure. I have universally found that 

 the spots which the regular tour-writers, the persons of wit, honour, and 

 common-place books, colour with all their ink, are the most abominable 

 spots on which description could alight, while all the pretty ones escape 

 them by a direct law of nature. It was on an evening, which, in Paris — 

 even la belle, and la superbe, and what not, Paris — would have been 

 dark as mist, rain and sleet mingled could have made it, for it was deep 

 in November ; I climbed the hills overhanging the little town to which 

 Napoleon's landing from Egypt has given a niche in history. IMan 



