ARRIVAL IN LONDON.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS.

Travelling-Climate-Gas-British Inventions-Advantages of a London Atmosphere-Idleness and Industry-Love of Domestic Life.

WHEN, on his first arrival in England, the foreigner is seated on the roof of a carriage which bears him towards London at the rate of eight miles an hour, he cannot help believing himself hurried along in the car of Pluto to the descent into the realms of darkness, especially if he have just left Spain or Italy, the favourite regions of the sun.

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In the midst of wonder, he can hardly avoid, at first setting off, being struck with an impression of melancholy. An eternal cloud of smoke which involves and penetrates every thing; a fog which, during the months of November and December, now grey, now red, now of a dirty yellow, always obscures, and sometimes completely extinguishes, the light of day, cannot fail to give a lugubrious and Dantesque air to this immeasurable and interminable capital. He, above all, who is just arrived from a sunny country, experiences, as I said before, the same effect as when, from the bright light of noon, he enters a half-closed chamber: at the first glance he sees nothing, but afterwards, by little and little, he discerns the barp, the lady, the sofa, and the other agreeable objects in the apartment. Caracciolo, the ambassa

dor to George the Third, was not in the wrong when he said, that the moon of Naples was warmer than the sun of London. In fact, for several days the sun only appears in the midst of the darkness visible, like a great yellow spot. London is a "panorama of the sun," in which he is often better seen than felt. On the 29th of November, 1826, there was an eclipse visible in England: the sky that day happened to be clear, but nobody took the least notice of the phenomenon, because the fog produces in one year more eclipses in England than there ever were, from other causes, perhaps since the creation of the world.

One day I was strolling in Hyde Park, in company with a Peruvian; it was one of the fine days of London, but the sun was so obscured by the fog, that it had

taken the form of a great globe of fire. "What do you think of the sun to-day?" said I to my companion. "I thought," replied the adorer of the true sun," that the end of the world was come! Was it not a singular caprice of Fortune, that where there is the least light, the great Newton should have been born to analyse it?" It appears to me like the other

singularity, that Alfieri, who analysed Liberty so well, should have been born in Italy, where they have less of it, perhaps, than any where else. After all, what of it? The English, by force of industry, have contrived to manufacture for themselves even a sun. Is it not indeed a sun, -that gas, which, running underground through all the island, illuminates the whole in a fiat lur? It is a sun, without twilight and without setting, that rises and

disappears like a flash of lightning, and that too, just when we want it. The gas-illumination of London is so beautiful, that M. Sismondi had good reason to say, that in London, in order to see, you must wait till night. The place of St. Antonio, at Cadiz, on a starry summer's evening,the noisy Strada Toledo of Naples, silvered by the moon, the Parisian Tivoli, blazing with fireworks;-none of them can sustain a comparison with the Regent Street of London, lighted by gas. Nor is this artificial sun an exclusive advantage of the capital; it shines every where with the impartiality of the great planet, illuminating alike the palace and the hovel. Whoever travels in England by night, in the country around Leeds, Nottingham, Derby, or Manchester, imagines he sees on every side the enchanted palaces of the fairies,