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Sir, the chief cause of my application to your Royal Highness was, the anxiety of a friend to learn something of the Institutions of this Country, more particularly its National Education,—a pursuit in which I need not add a very trifling civility from your Royal Highness in facilitating access to those Institutions, must have aided materially. And, Sir, when I call to mind the manner in which your Royal Highness was pleased so exuberantly to magnify your sense of the obligations you owed my husband, and the formal memento and pledge of kindness to come, with which your acknowledgment of those obligations was sealed and delivered, (it wanted but the signature to give it the gravity of a bond, good in law,) I humbly trust it was not so very unreasonable a debt I contemplated to your hospitality, my venturing to look for such sort of civilities.

Your Royal Highness, for some excellent reason, no doubt, deems it expedient to avoid intrusion of this kind as much as possible; and I of course bow with the most profound deference to your Royal Highness's good pleasure, merely reserving the British privilege of putting the matter on record, to prevent any misconstruction of either of us, that might arise from a partial escape of the cir

cumstances.

Your Royal Highness not having condescended to honour my Letter with notice, is, to be sure, a very mortifying consideration; the weight of it being only

alleviated, when I reflect what must be the exhausted state of your Royal Highness's hospitality, from the numerous demands that it must invite. Let me at least hope, Sir, that twenty years and upwards since your Royal Highness's flattering professions were made, may acquit me of any very excessive eagerness to take advantage of them: and I trust you will bear in mind what I have already used the freedom of telling your Royal Highness, that I sought for no favour, and that I would accept of none.*

The election of the Deputies appears to me not very remotely to resemble that in our rotten boroughs, (by the by, how familiarly one talks of rotten boroughs, as if they were an essential recognized part of the Constitution!) in consequence of the power which the Government possesses, by the nomination of

* After all, the only thing I had particularly to regret from my disappointment in the royal condescension, was a lost opportunity of learning something more of the mutual schools which I do own was rather provoking. Fortunately, however, through an old friend at Court, I attained part of my object, that of getting access to the prisons, the doors of which were thrown open to me throughout the whole depart

ment.

all their civil officers, from the Préfet of a department down to the Maire of the commune. Were these officers free to act for themselves, the constitution must throw immense weight into the popular scale. Before the budget can be applied to the purposes of its destination, it is required that the portion to be allotted to the departments shall be submitted to the Prêfet, who must summon his conseil de département to deliberate on the mode of its distribution. The result of this decision is then to be forwarded to the sub-préfet of the arrondissement, who is obliged to take the same step, and call upon the advice of his conseil d'arrondissement, and so down through the communes and parishes; thus affording the people opportunities of holding frequent deliberations. All alterations or objections to the original plan of applying the public money, is then transmitted to the minister for his decision. But supposing these magistrates to be under the influence of corruption, what a frightful apparatus in the hands of administration, such an arrangement is susceptible of being converted into against liberty! It would be

should pass for wise." But who will undertake the inventory; and even if it were complete in all its knavish detail, would it make one dupe less?

There is another vast field of gain to a hand practised in turning human imbecility to account, and that is, patronage. To see the use a leech with a good tact makes of a man of any distinction is pleasant. Dr. Johnson said that an entertaining book might be compiled out of the failures of physicians of high acquirements. A much more amusing one might be got up by a detail of the successes of the opposite class. A simple lord or two, on his last legs, I have seen keep the doctor afloat in a diurnal bulletin for a whole year together, till he has mounted on dozens the year after to a most lucrative business.

The following translation of a French letter, itself purporting to be the translation of one originally in German, was put into my hands in Paris. It is written in an odd, quaint, aphoristical style, by a person of the name

of Von Tronk, and addressed to his nephew, going to reside for his health at one of the German Spas, and contains some rather curious matter; shewing how much alike human nature is every where.

After relating many modes of imposition, which had been practised on himself during a long residence at a watering-place, he proceeds to admonish his relative circumstantially to the following effect :

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Beware," says he, "of that doctor whose door you see standing constantly open, or ajar. It is generally a trap to decoy the unwary, and the infallible mark of a craft. That town abounds with it in every form; and I am anxious, from my own painful experience, to give you some instructions how to keep clear both of Scylla and Charybdis.

66

You will be beset with the doctor's lures

in all shapes.

66 CONSULT NO DOCTOR WITHOUT KNOWING

FROM SOME GOOD AUTHORITY WHETHER HE BE A MAN OF EDUCATION."

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