powerful. He is not, however, gifted with the lungs of a Gurr or Newlands. Standing near Mr. Howson is a provincial swimmer of some fame, named Johnson. He is lame, but nevertheless is reckoned to be one of the best swimmers in England. It may here be noticed that while every other athletic art or game is debarred to the cripple, he can swim, float, and dive with no perceptible inconvenience. It is really a pleasure to see, as I have often seen, cripples enjoy their only exercise, and paddle about with an avidity and earnestness which gives some idea both of the irreparable loss they have sustained and of the value of the pleasure they are enjoying. On the spring-board stands J. P. Jones, who was second for Sir William Fraser's medal last year. This gold medal, presented annually to be swum for, the course being a mile in the Thames, by amateurs only, has had the effect of slightly rousing swimmers from the lethargy they appear to have fallen into. The prize has been well contested, and on each occasion has resulted in a capital race. Why do not some other public-spirited gentlemen appear who will give an annual five-pound prize? If any would do so, there would be, even in spite of the insufficiency of baths, a great deal more attention paid to the art by the youth of this country. I have concluded my sketch of the celebrities portrayed in the engraving. There are necessarily a great number of first-class swimmers not included therein, such as Mr. Coulter, of the Serpentine Club, who last season swam a remarkably close and fast race with Gurr, going 1000 yards in still water in 16 minutes, and Mr. Mather, who defeated and was defeated by Beckwith for the championship before the rising of Gurr. But if all good men are not drawn there, it is simply lack of room which prevents it. Early in this notice I spoke of the want of accommodation, and I wish now just to mention a circumstance connected with what accommodation we have. When Gurr swam his back race with the Unknown,' he swallowed some of the Serpentine water, the effect of which was to make him actually vomit. Again, when the long-distance prize was being contested in the Thames (in which race three gentlemen swam over eight miles), the competitors suffered greatly from the impurity of the water. Surely Mr. Cowper might look to the Hyde Park water being in a tolerably clear state, and it is to be hoped that the Main Drainage Works and the Thames Embankment will somewhat cleanse the river. Finally, I am glad to see that the National Olympian Association, at their great gathering to be held shortly at Llandudno, are to give some gold, silver, and bronze medals for various swimming races. I fervently hope that this will give some impetus to the practice of the art of natation, and be the precursor of many other such competitions. COFFEE-HOUSE AND TAVERN LIFE OF PARIS. HE decline of the popularity of Tavern life in London was put before the readers of London Society' in a short article on Clubs and Taverns' in our number for March last. The 'at home' tendencies of settled Englishmen lead them to cultivate to the full the domestic advantages with which Providence has blessed them. But with a more mercurial temperament, and an atmosphere which must be confessed to be a little better and clearer than our own, the Parisians have not to the same extent forsaken the public haunt or the open-air restaurant. The Frenchman, as a national necessity, finds it inconvenient or unattractive to live at home; to think at home; to eat, drink, suffer and die at home; and has a fondness for something more Spectacular in his sayings, doings, and endurances. Publicity, the broad day, the throng, the street, are essential to his reckoning of things as good or evil, as happy or unfortunate, as amusing or deplorable. From this necessary tendency have sprung the cafés, the cabarets, the buvettes of Paris; the multiplicity of which forms a standing wonder to the stranger now as it did in the days of Parson Yorick. M. Jules Simon, in a recent work of his entitled 'Le Travail,' would have us believe that this appetite for company and for refreshment in public places is, especially amongst the ouvriere class, of great and evil reflex influence. The frequenting of the cabaret denudes the home, and furnishes the Mont de Piété; and the denuded home, with the clamour of dejected wife and starving children, drives again to the cabaret. 'The cabaret,' says M. Simon, 'destroys at once the physical and the moral force of the workman. Close by the manufactories and workshops these alcohol dens abound-unless there be, as often happens, one which is beyond all competition, and this one is crowded on paydays. The rooms, the gardens, the courtyards are crammed, and even in the cellars drinking is going on. A vast number of working men only cross the street from the pay-office, where they have received their wages, to the cabaret, where they spend them. They return to it the next day and the day after, till they have no longer money or credit. During all this time the wife and children are suffering from cold and hunger. They flit round the cabaret' with the hopes of catching his eye, and thinking that, after all, a father is not utterly insensible to pity or remorse. But that man is no longer a father, nor even a man; he is merely ruined and drunk on issuing from the cabaret. If he has not beaten somebody, or himself been beaten, the family have reason to rejoice. A drunkard who enters a cabaret is never sure of not going to prison the next day. Many books of morality and medicine have been written on this ignoble vice; the latter are better, because they abound in irrefragable facts.' But the evil is not limited to the men or to the metropolis. Even in France there are towns where women rival men in habits of intoxication. At Lille, at Rouen, there are some so saturated with it that their infants refuse to take the breast of a sober woman. In the mountains of the Vosges infants drink eau-de-vie. On Sunday, in the churches, the air is literally infected with the smell of eau-de-vie made from potatoes. In these mountains there are no more frequent causes of idiotcy and imbecility; for in general the dwellings are healthy, and the water is excellent. The great misfortune is that the children of habitual drunkards are idiots, so that the punishment follows from generation to generation, from the guilty and degraded father to the innocent children. In the manufacturing towns the mayors are obliged to take measures against the cabarets that supply eau-de-vie to children; for there are drunkards of fifteen, as there are labourers at eight; and, morally and physically, they present a melancholy spectacle. Can it be this precocious debauchery and the consequences of it which oblige the War Department to lower the regulation height for the service?' Such facts, taken with the revelations of the extent to which absinthe dram-drinking was lately stated to be carried on in Paris, go far to redeem our own country from a monopoly of the charge of drunkenness. Albeit, it is a sorry comfort, in the midst of a popular vice, to know that other nations are redeeming us 'from comparative degradation, by descending from the moral elevation which they flattered themselves they had a right to claim, But it is not our present province to moralise. We rather incline to cull what is picturesque or entertaining in the more pleasant phase of the cabaret question. And materials for this are abundant. For it is the complaint of Parisian spinsters, whose chances of matrimony are already down nearly at zero, that 'la vie de café' is lived in that jolly capital by all the world-by the grandee and by the mechanic, by the rich and the poor, by the artist and the artisan. So in visiting the cabarets and the cafés of Paris, we may perchance have to rub shoulders now with a Duke of the Empire, now with the faded gentry of the Palais Royal, now with the dark and unfrequent conspirator of what remains of the dismal and attenuated streets of the ancient cité. M. Alfred Delvau, with whom we have obtained the privilege of sauntering through some of the haunts which he knows better than we do, pleasantly defends cabarets and cafés as against the ill-natured objections of those provincial fathers whose last caution it is to their sons, on going up to Paris, to beware of such places of perdition.' Diogenes the cynic and Socrates the sage, he happens to know, and we cannot gainsay him, frequented without reserve the taverns of Athens; even when the practice brought them into contact with the porters of the Piræus, the lounging demagogues of the Pnyx, and the Anonymas of the Ceramicus. Dionysius the Younger, ex-tyrant of Syracuse, solaced his retirement from the kingly business with visits to the taverns of Corinth; as Virgil, with his friends Varius and Gallus, pleasantly and even flirtingly passed their leisure in outlandish restaurants. Ovid, Cicero, Marc Antony, in like manner countenanced by their example the amenities and pleasances of tavern life. In times more modern Shakspeare frequented the Swan, and wrote there the greater part of his Henry IV.; Lúther visited the Cabaret de l'Ourse Noire, at Orlemonde; and the jovial Rabelais, serious at nothing but the reckoning, his backwardness to face which has made the time of settling to be known proverbially as 'le quart d'heure de Rabelais,' lounged in his easy chair at the Cave Peinte, at Chinon; Cromwell hob-a-nobbed at the Red Lion, in the Strand, with Price and Harrison; Goethe wrote his ballad 'To the Flea,' and several of the scenes of Faust,' at the Auerbach Keller, at Leipzig; Voltaire sipped his wine at the Café Procope; the Abbé Prevost, at a cabaret in the Rue de la Hachette, where he composed his Manon Lescaut;' and Crebillon, Piron, and Marmontel, at the Cabaret de Landel, in the Rue de Buci. Can our readers be shocked, after such a muster-roll of dignities and respectabilities, if we ask them to be of the company whilst we join M. Delvau in his peregrinations? If the precedents seem insufficient, they may rest assured that they are not a thousandth part of what might have been quoted to authorize such an excursion as we propose. And, after all, it will not be a long one; although the ground covered will be pretty extensive. On second thoughts, if they like it better, and their consciences and their long skirts are easier for the process, we will bring the tableaux to them as they lightly press the couch or the settee. The mountain shall be brought to Mahomet; for the houris, our readers, shall be accomplished a feat which could not have been performed for an Ishmaelitish prophet. Behold us, then, let us say rather more than a dozen years ago, at the entrance of the Andler-Keller, in the Rue Hautefeuille, which occu pies the site of a by-gone priory of the Prémontrés. The host is a Bavarian-hence the German designation of his house-and is a goodly man of very imposing proportions; round as a barrel, jolly as a tankard, merry with the men, gallant with the ladies-without prejudice, however, to his better-half, a buxom Suisse of Anvers, whose ancestors figure in the 'Roi Boit' of Jacques Jordaens, which adorns the collections of the Louvre. We enter, and ensconce ourselves behind a liberal measure of beer; smoke dreamily, and watch the dreamy smoking of other people. Discourse begins, spreads, and becomes general-rather of the Babel order. German philosophy has come in like a flood; and, as Heinrich Heine said nearly twenty years ago, that, as the French had changed the colour of their pantaloons from white to red, so had they engrafted Hengstenberg on Voltaire, and learned to chatter of Kant, Fichté, and Hegel. It wants still two good hours of midnight, yet Madame Andler shows signs of drowsiness; while Mdlle. Louise imitates her mistress in a corner apart, so far at least as she dares, for her head, as becomes her ancillary position, oscillates with less emphatic, but equally significant nods; the more wide-awake M. Andler meanwhile making, suo more, one of a party at piquet. Everybody is speaking, and the scene is animated, perhaps a little irregular and bewildering. Realism, of which M. Courbel is the sovereign pontiff, and M. Champfleury the officiating cardinal, is in the ascendant; and the public of drinkers, divided mainly, as to profession, into students and wood-engravers, are divided philosophically into Realists and nonRealists. It is impossible to follow the order of discourse and argument; but our ears must perforce take in the din of phrases that struggle forth from the lungs of enthusiasts, sceptics, and innovators of every order-apostles of ideas; missionaries of art; friends of progress, of liberty; theologians, metaphysicians, and men of letters; whilst arises above all the jargon, still more uncouth to laymen and outsiders, of the gentlemen of the long robe. Hush, babblers! Courbel enters the Brasserie-a word literally signifying brewery, but lending itself, by an elegant metonomy, to the place where beer is sold and consumed. Courbel, as Theophile Souvestre depicts him in his 'Histoire des Peintres Vivants,' is a very fine and handsome man of some thirtysix years of age; whose very re-. markable figure would appear to have been modelled on an Assyrian basso-relievo. His eyes are black and bright, toned down to tenderness by long silky lashes, and shining forth with the softened radiance of those of a gazelle. This is the pontiff of Realism, and all the company suspend their operations to gaze at him. The piquet-players are dumb; the smoke stays in the mouths of the smokers; the billiard-players bring their cues to the salute. He sits-talks awhile; whilst all listen. He retires; and all devote themselves to his anatomy. One wonders at his superb head; another, at his aquiline nose, and his exquisite mouth; a third sets him down for an Assyrian; a fourth for a Spaniard; a fifth for a Venetian; a sixth for an Indian; a seventh for a Byzantian -and each for whatever appears to him most to savour of the noble and distingué But not play alone, or conversation alone, goes on at the AndlerKeller. It is famous also for its love of song. Staal, the artist, knows a bundle of Swiss and Tyrolese ditties, amongst others the 'Ranz des Vaches,' and he sings them, much to the edification of the hostess. On other occasions, Courbel, in his voix besontine, mais agréable,' chants forth the realism, about which he has just been seriously discoursing, in such pleasant forms as this: Tous les garçon chantaient, Le soir au cabaret qu'ils étaient réunis Tous les garçons chantaient, Répétant ce refrain: Tra la la la la, lou lou lou, la, Tra la la la la, lou lou lou, la, Trou lou lou lou lou lou, Le premier qui chanta, Raconta ses amours,' &c. Of all the cafés of Paris, the Café de la Rotonde is, if not the most ancient, at any rate the best known. At first it was called the Café du Caveau, from its situation in a tastefully-arranged souterrain in a garden of the Palais Royal. It is frequented, from one hour of the day to another, by pleasant loungers, habitués of the Opera, and by persons generally who have a sensitive taste in the matter of ices. Not a few literary people repair to it; and its decision, in matters of taste and criticism, is a tribute worth the having. From its verdicts, however, if we may believe the Correspondance Secrete, there lies an appeal to the tribunal of Common Sense. About the year 1812, the Café du Caveau became the Café du Perron, when it was raised from its underground position to the ordinary level, an event which followed as a consequence upon some alterations of the Palais Royal. Then it became the Café de la Rotonde-a name which it popularly and persistently retains, in defiance of the alteration of title adopted in celebration of the Treaty of Amiens, and inscribed on its front-Pavillion de la Paix. Some of our readers may recognize it as the place where they were startled from their contemplative smoke, or their first sip of café noir, by the deep voice of its celebrated garçon-not the only waiter, they will remember, by a dozen-who gave a cavernous resonance to his enunciation of the Bon, which was his benighted way of signalling the more enlightened 'All right' of the Britisher. The original Bon-of which the present one must 'pardon us for saying that he is a feeble imitator-called himself Lafont, but was called by everybody else, Lablache, on account of the depth of his voice, which shook the very foundations of the pavilion, as he, in the politest thunder imaginable, demanded 'Pas d'crême, mossieu ?' In order to economize his voice, of which he was justly proud, Lablache-Lafont exercised his vocation only during the summer half-year, which was sufficiently profitable to justify him in laying up in ordinary during the winter. An old Marquis, struck by the stentorian ring and power of his organ, interested himself to get its owner entered at the Conservatoire, in order that it might be developed in a higher sphere of art. But at the Conservatoire, Lafont-Lablache either could not or would not do anything at all; and as he had a hankering after the snowy cloth and the table round, he returned to his occupation at the Café de la Rotonde. This ornament of his race survived his intellect, whatever that may have been in quality or quantity, and died demented. When the wanderer would leave Old Paris, by the ancient barrier Montparnasse, to enter the New, he would find himself in a long, noisy, rambling street, fringed with guinguettes and cabarets of all sorts, called the Rue de la Gaîté. The street is well named, moralizes M. Delvau, in so far that, from morn to dewy eve, people drink and keep holiday, sing, dance, and enjoy themselves; but not so well named if it be considered for a moment, that just behind the clustering houses of entertainment there is the immense cemetery du Sud, where arrive every hour a pressing crowd of guests who never return, and who are, in fact, in a condition to enjoy only the last long rest of the dead. What matter! civilized people are not supposed to be anxious about such trifling contrasts. The neighbourhood of the dead gives an edge to the joys of the living-it is the sauce to their ragoûts. If they die, let us be lively; if they sleep, let us be wakeful; if they weep, it is all the more imperative that we should laugh. Fond Bohemian memories cling to the very names of the Cabarets of the Rue de la Gaîté: the Cabarets de Richelieu and des Deux Edmond, the Café des Mille Colonnes, the Californie; and chiefly and above all, to the Cabaret des Vrais Amis, kept by la Mère Cadet, the personnel of whose establishment consisted of herself, her husband, of a diminutive female help, and two enormous dogs of different sexes. The cuisine here is, or was, of the simplest order - Bifteck aux pommes, potage, bœuf |