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The king has the reputation of being much pleased with the English character, and very fond of the society of Englishmen; a gratification which a series of adverse circumstances has prevented him from indulging in for some time past. I remember, when I was at Paris, during the brief pause of war, that just gave a time for frighted peace to pant," he was never more happy than when he had one of our countrymen at his splendid and hospitable table.

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The queen is, as she was also described to me, a brunette of considerable beauty, inclined to the en bon point, has a face expressive of great suavity of mind, and is highly accomplished; she particularly excels in dancing, in which, for the gracefulness of her attitudes, she is said to be unrivalled. To this elegant accomplishment she is particu larly attached, and when she travels, is generally complimented, in any considerable town where she stops for a day or two, with a public ball, an attention by which she is always much gratified.

Their majesties have two princes who are very young; the eldest is called Napoleon after the emperor. Should the dynasty of the Bonapartes experience no convulsive overthrow, it is generally believed that, upon the demise of that extraordinary being, who has pushed so many kings

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DUTY OF A TOURIST.

from their thrones to make room for the members of his own family, the crown of France will devolve upon this child.

In detailing these few anecdotes, which to me at least were interesting, I have been induced by a veneration for truth alone, to give a representation which, to such as think that nothing favourable, however deserved, should be reported of those with whom we are not in amity, will not be very palatable. To an enemy, if not generous, let us at least be always just. It is as base in principle, as it is dangerous in politics, to depreciate the popularity of a prince with whom we are at war, for it obviously leads to a miscalculation of his influence upon his people, and of the nature and extent of his strength and resources.

I abhor fuming a sovereign with adulation, more especially the ruler of a country at war with my own; but it is what I owe to my own country to relate the fact.

CHAPTER III.

COMMISSION COUNTENANCES-PHYSIOGNOMIES COMPARED HOMAGE PAID TO GENIUS ERASMUS'S STATUE-INSCRIPTION——-REVOLUTIONARY WHIMS LEARNED GALLANTRY-KISSES-ANECDOTES OF ERASMUS-CATHEDRAL OF SAINT LAWRENCE-THE RIVAL ORGAN CHARITY SCHOOLS-PUBLIC EXAMINATIONS-EFFECTS OF EDUCATION ON THE PUBIC MIND-HIS GRACE THE DUKE OF BEDFORDMR. LANCASTER'S SCHOOL.

IN my way to the celebrated statue of Erasmus, and indeed wherever I moved, almost every face I met looked as if it belonged to a soul more disposed to cultivate the figures of arithmetic, than of rhetoric. I saw none of those sprightly physiognomies, which abound in the large towns of England or France, full of smiles, of levity, and carelessness, the happy owners of which appear as if they basked and frolicked in the sunshine of every event. Even the Spanish proverb, "thoughts close, looks loose," is not observed in this city. An eye prone to the earth, a look of settled meditation, and a measured pace denote the Rotterdammer. Yet with these appearances Holland has not been insensible to that literary merit, in honour of which, in other times and regions, the Grecians and

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HOMAGE PAID TO GENIUS.

Romans raised temples, statues, and constituted public games, to which the Persians, the Arabians, the Turks, and even the Chinese, presented the most magnificent rewards.

As the inhabitants of Languedoc established floral games, at which they bestowed golden flowers as prizes to the fortunate poets; as Rome crowned Petrarch with laurel ; as Ravenna erected a marble tomb to the memory of Dante, and Certaldo a statue to Boccaccio; as delighted princesses touched with their fragrant lips the cheeks of poets; as the Venetians paid to Sannazarius six hundred pistoles for six verses; as Baif received a silver image of Minerva from his native city, and Ronsard had apartments reserved for him in the palace of Charles IX. of France, and also the honor of receiving poetical epistles from that monarch: behold the Hollander has raised a superb bronze figure to the memory of that great restorer of the Latin tongue, Erasmus.

This statue stands upon an arch crossing a canal, and is nearly ten feet high; it was finished in 1622, and is said to be the chef-d'œuvre of Henry de Keiser, a very celebrated statuary and architect. It has been said, that in the quality of the different statues which the Dutch raised to the memory of Erasmus, may be traced the different

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degrees of zeal with which his memory was cherished by them.

In 1540 they raised a statue of wood; seventeen years afterwards, blushing for the little respect they had observed, they exchanged it for one of blue stone; and in sixty-five years following apotheothized him by the noble memorial of their veneration, which I contemplated with equal admiration and delight. In 1572 the Spaniards, Vandal-like, shot at the stone statue with their muskets, and threw it in the canal, from whence it was afterwards raised and again set up, by order of the magistrates, upon the expulsion of the Spaniards; upon whom the Dutch retaliated in the most spirited and gallant manner, by attacking that nation through her colonial establishments in the East and West-Indies, and in Africa, and by capturing the rich galleons of their merciless invaders.

The bronze figure is clad in an ecclesiastical habit, with an open book in his hand. Various attempts have at different times been made to convert the sage into a turncoat: before the revolution which expelled the stadtholder and his family, every concavity in his dress was crammed, on certain holidays, with oranges; during the hey-day of the republican form of government, amidst the celebration of its festivals, he was covered with tri-coloured rib

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