201 
A VISIT TO THE GREAT EXHIBITION. . 
By M. Gourdon, from the Veterinary School at Toulouse, France. 
LANDED at Southampton, M. Gourdon—whom some of our 
readers resident in and near London will remember having seen 
—finds himself in a town whose streets, running at right angles, 
are large and gloomy and silent, in the midst of a misty pene¬ 
trating rain, with a grey sky over his head : unvarying speci¬ 
mens, he adds, of the atmosphere of Britain. 
From Southampton he proceeds by rail to London, and in 
the course of his journey is struck with the use made of every 
particle of land for the purposes of agriculture. All is in a state 
of cultivation. Inclosure succeeds inclosure without interrup¬ 
tion. Here are corn-fields, meadows, and pastures; further on 
are square plots of garden ground, all neat and clean and re¬ 
gular ; drilled in lines, weeded with care: in a word, tended 
to with a solicitude denotive of an advanced state of agriculture. 
Nor do we see land uselessly encumbered with large hedges; 
but, instead, partitioned off by railings or fences of wood, 
evincing the care the English take of losing nothing through a 
want of reciprocal good feeling between the several proprietors 
of adjoining lands. 
He arrives in London, the immense commercial bazaar of the 
world; the town of barter and business, wherein pleasure be¬ 
comes the exception, and life without business is despised; the 
town of contrast, wherein the most colossal fortunes rub elbows 
against the most squalid wretchedness; certain parts of which 
display scenes of great agitation, while in others nought is to 
be seen but cold and tristful solicitude; the town of fog, of rain, 
and of mud, whose styptic climate freezes the imagination and 
destroys the energy of thought, leaving to man nothing save the 
faculty of the enjoyment of things to the extent of their absolute 
utility, yet a faculty cultivated by the English to the highest 
point with every conceivable ingenuity! 
But M. Gourdon, on better acquaintance with it, finds Lon¬ 
don—by way of compensation as it were for the desagremens 
he at first encountered—an exceptional city, inasmuch as every¬ 
body in it enjoys full liberty of movement, act, and word, and 
is as free as though he were in the midst of a desert; wherein, 
indeed, a foreigner, and especially a Frenchman, finds himself 
after a four-and-twenty hours’ sojourn, instinctively relieved of 
his national individuality, which he in vain endeavours to re¬ 
assume ; in fact, a free town, open to every body, without anv 
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