OF ILLUSTRIOUS MEN.

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The view of a vast national receptacle for the remains of the illustrious dead is well calculated to excite among the living who may contemplate it a spirit for performing worthy actions. A person who has walked among the monuments of Westminster Abbey, and gazed at the lettered marbles, covering the congregrated ashes of heroes, poets, statesmen and philosophers, must have a heart as cold and spiritless as the marble which he contemplates, not to feel for a time a rising glow of emulation prompting to generous and noble deeds; and a desire to be finally "gathered to sleep among the good and the great of the land." It falls to the lot of few to become eminent; but almost every one may feel the incitement of new motives, which may contribute to render him a better if not a more distinguished man. To establish, in a Republic like the United States, a national repository for the ashes of the illustrious dead might induce men of talents to use increased exertion to merit the honor; but an insuperable difficulty would occur in creating a tribunal to decide on the merits of the dead, for whom partial friends might claim the enviable distinction.

SHOPS AND BUSINESS TRANSACTIONS OF PARIS.

Most of the trading concerns of the shops of Paris are managed by women, who set the prices and receive the pay for goods. Even where several young men are employed as clerks, I have noticed a female presiding over all, seated at an elevated desk; and the purchaser, after selecting his articles, takes them to the desk of this supervisor, who enters the amount and receives the pay. This peculiar arrangement may be resorted to for the purpose of entrusting the money affairs of an extensive shop to a single confidential person, in a city where there are so

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many temptations to allure young men to petty peculations. Females preside also over the assembled multitudes of several hundred men who dine every day in the large halls of the coffee houses, where they sit at the receipt of custom, mounted on thrones resplendant with gilding and mirrors. The veritable throne of the Viceroy of Italy was purchased, and actually removed to a coffee-house in Paris, to be occupied by one of these French women, who, elevated in royal state, makes out the bills for the guests, receives the money from the hands of the waiters and returns the change. It is often exceedingly difficult for a foreigner to decipher, at first, some of the accounts or bills of parcels made out by the shopkeeper, owing to the peculiar style of writing and of forming figures, almost universal throughout France. It seems as if every Frenchman had been taught the art of penmanship by the same writing-master, so peculiar are the little supernumerary flourishes and appendages to the letters; by general consent a sort of crooked S passes for the representative of the digital number 5.

The streets of the city are always thronged with female traders, who walk out and encounter the fervid rays of the sun, with no other covering for their heads than lace or white cotton caps. The men, in the meanwhile, are fulfilling the domestic duties, and are at work within doors, perhaps engaged in making beds or making soups, and performing other culinary operations in the kitchen. Our bed is made and our room is dusted by a man, and the public bath is attended by a female; and even at the door of the "cabinet d'aisance" a girl meets me with a smile, and receives the two or three sous as the humble recompense on departing.* As it has often been remark

*These Cabinets d'aisance" are constructed in almost every part of the city of Paris, and are of great convenience to the stranger during his rambles to distant parts of the city. Even in the very vicinity of the

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ed, indeed, the women and the men seem to have changed stations and labors.

In the affrays which commenced the Revolution, the market women were among the leaders and prime instigators of the mobs. In public amusements, the women also participate apparently with more zeal than the men, strolling in multitudes through the walks of the Boulevards and gardens, or seated beneath the trees in the Elysian Fields, or sipping sugared water, red wine, or coffee, at the restaurateurs. Where the female sex are so much occupied and amused abroad, domestic enjoyments are not generally much prized. In one instance, I observed a whole family enter a restaurateur's hall, to dine. Even the striplings followed in the rear and formed a part of the family groupe, lagging behind with their hoops and playthings in their hands. The ostensible object of this custom is stated to be economy. The heavy expenses of a kitchen fire and of keeping a cook is saved to a small family, when the necessary provisions are received from the restaurateur ready prepared for the table; or when the whole family resorts together to the public table of a Cafe. To supply all these public as well as private tables, there are cafes and restaurateurs in nearly every street of the city.

Almost every cafe and fashionable shop are decorated with mirrors, which are not only suspended in the ordinary way, but are also inserted like the pannels of a wainscotted room, to form the whole sides of the apartments. There is probably no country in which a more prevalent taste exists for ornamental mirrors, than in France. So artfully are they arranged to produce deceptive reflections, not only of the goods, but also of the purchasers themselves, that the reflected images seem to become infinitely multiplied.

palace of the Tuileries one of these sign boards offers to the eye of the passenger in the street, in large letters, a tempting invitation to a " Cabi net inodore,"

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In one instance, on entering a very small shop, I supposed myself amid an extensive store-room filled with beautiful goods, arranged in uniform cases, which seemed to extend in regularly diminished sizes to a remote distance, with a customer in front of every case, handling the same identical article which I had taken up. One is thus almost instinctively induced in haste to secure the purchase of the article he may have selected, when he finds himself surrounded by so many imitative competitors.

The taste for mirrors extends even to the decorations of a Frenchman's steam engine, one of which, exhibited at a window of a chocolate shop, I saw thus singularly beautitified. This small steam engine, of less than one horse power, was employed to crush and prepare the cocoa, immediately under the inspection of each fastidious customer, who may thus by ocular demonstration convince himself of the freshness of the manufacture of this component article of his favorite beverage. When on passing a shop window one first obtains a glimpse of the various parts of a steam engine thus reflecting the rays of light, glittering and flashing in the sunbeams whilst in full movement beneath a canopy of mirrors, sustained by polished steel pillars with capitals of the same resplendent metal, the effect for a moment seems truly magical. These costly little miniature machines are exhibited to arrest the attention of the hurrying passenger on the sidewalk, and to cause him to pause for a few moments, to gaze,—and perhaps to become a purchaser. Here, even in the construction of a Parisian steam engine for manufacturing purposes, elaborate ornaments are appended which might fit it for becoming an ornament to a drawing room. The Englishman, on the contrary, seems to delight in surveying this machine in all its ponderous, dark and massy proportions, exerting a power which gives sublimity to its grand movements.

In

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works of ornament and taste, the French artists thus commonly eclipse all competitors.

MIRROR MANUFACTORY.

France has long been celebrated for the manufacture of beautiful mirrors, which have been made sufficiently large to be considered as magnificent royal presents from the rulers of this country to those of foreign nations. We stopped at the gate of one of the most extensive manufactories of this kind, and were admitted readily by the porter to survey the different processes.

The first apartment, two hundred feet in length, contained about one hundred and seventy men employed in grinding down the surfaces of large slabs or plates of cast glass, which process they accomplish by placing one plate on another with sharp sand between them, and by drawing the upper plate back and forth whilst thus resting on the under one; in the same manner as stone cutters smooth their slabs of marble, two surfaces being ground by mutual attrition at each operation. The attrition is continued by a fresh supply of wet sand introduced from time to time between the plates.

Large mirror plates are cast originally, at the glass furnaces, in moulds about half an inch in thickness, and in superficial dimensions of the desired size. The largest mirrors when completed have been sold for the sum of twelve and thirteen hundred dollars each.

After the surfaces of the plates of glass are ground down perfectly smooth and plain, which is a long and arduous operation performed by men and women, they are taken to another equally large apartment to be polished. It appeared to me that by the aid of water or steam power, and some little machinery, a dozen hands might accomplish as much work in this process as the host of laborers perform,