But if the general aspect of things left much to be desired from a utilitarian point of view, its strangeness and picturesqueness would not fail to compensate an imaginative youth for the want of order and comfort.

The strong contrast of wealth and poverty, of luxury and distress, that gave to the whole country so melancholy an appearance, was, as it were, focussed in its capital.
Mr.Coxe, who visited Warsaw not long before Nicholas Chopin's arrival there, says:-- The streets are spacious, but ill-paved; the churches and public buildings large and magnificent, the palaces of the nobility are numerous and splendid; but the greatest part of the houses, especially the suburbs, are mean and ill- constructed wooden hovels.
What, however, struck a stranger most, was the throngs of humanity that enlivened the streets and squares of Warsaw, the capital of a nation composed of a medley of Poles, Lithuanians, Red and White Russians, Germans, Muscovites, Jews, and Wallachians, and the residence of a numerous temporary and permanent foreign population.

How our friend from quiet Nancy--which long ago had been deserted by royalty and its train, and where literary luminaries, such as Voltaire, Madame du Chatelet, Saint Lambert, &c., had ceased to make their fitful appearances--must have opened his eyes when this varied spectacle unfolded itself before him.
The streets of stately breadth, formed of palaces in the finest Italian taste and wooden huts which at every moment threatened to tumble down on the heads of the inmates; in these buildings Asiatic pomp and Greenland dirtin strange union, an ever-bustling population, forming, like a masked procession, the most striking contrasts.

Long-bearded Jews, and monks in all kinds of habits; nuns of the strictest discipline, entirely veiled and wrapped in meditation; and in the large squares troops of young Polesses in light-coloured silk mantles engaged in conversation; venerable old Polish gentlemen with moustaches, caftan, girdle, sword, and yellow and red boots; and the new generation in the most incroyable Parisian fashion.

Turks, Greeks, Russians, Italians, and French in an ever-changing throng; moreover, an exceedingly tolerant police that interfered nowise with the popular amusements, so that in squares and streets there moved about incessantly Pulchinella theatres, dancing bears, camels, and monkeys, before which the most elegant carriages as well as porters stopped and stood gaping.
Thus pictures J.E.Hitzig, the biographer of E.Th.