Rugged and dark, above, below they are a blaze of ribands, gowns, watches, trinkets, artificial flowers; grapes, melons, and peaches such as Covent Garden does not furnish, filling the windows of the fruiterers; showy women swimming smoothly over the uneasy stones, and stared at by national guards swaggering by in full uniform.

It is the Soho Bazaar transplanted into the gloomy cloisters of Oxford." He writes to a friend just before he started on his tour: "There is much that I am impatient to see, but two things specially,--the Palais Royal, and the man who called me the Aristarchus of Edinburgh." Who this person might be, and whether Macaulay succeeded in meeting him, are questions which his letters leave unsolved; but he must have been a constant visitor at the Palais Royal if the hours that he spent in it bore any relation to the number of pages which it occupies in his correspondence.
The place was indeed well worth a careful study; for in 1830 it was not the orderly and decent bazaar of the Second Empire, but was still that compound of Parnassus and Bohemia which is painted in vivid colours in the "Grand Homme de Province" of Balzac,--still the paradise of such ineffable rascals as Diderot has drawn with terrible fidelity in his "Neveu de Rameau." "If I were to select the spot in all the earth in which the good and evil of civilisation are most strikingly exhibited, in which the arts of life are carried to the highest perfection, and in which all pleasures, high and low, intellectual and sensual, are collected in the smallest space, I should certainly choose the Palais Royal.

It is the Covent Garden Piazza, the Paternoster Row, the Vauxhall, the Albion Tavern, the Burlington Arcade, the Crockford's the Finish, the Athenaeum of Paris all in one.

Even now, when the first dazzling effect has passed off, I never traverse it without feeling bewildered by its magnificent variety.
As a great capital is a country in miniature, so the Palais Royal is a capital in miniature,--an abstract and epitome of a vast community, exhibiting at a glance the politeness which adorns its higher ranks, the coarseness of its populace, and the vices and the misery which lie underneath its brilliant exterior.

Everything is there, and everybody.
Statesmen, wits, philosophers, beauties, dandies, blacklegs, adventurers, artists, idlers, the king and his court, beggars with matches crying for charity, wretched creatures dying of disease and want in garrets.