mere tribute of his personal vanity to itself, and its site, because it embarrasses the Place Vendôme, a small octagon, into which only two streets open, instead of being erected in the adjoining Place de Louis XV. which affords the noblest situation perhaps in Europe for such a monument. The design, every one knows, is copied from Trajan's column-the only deviation is miserably for the worse; namely, the clumsy calotte' with which it is surmounted.

The arch of triumph in the Carousel it is impossible to see without being disgusted with the vanity and bad taste of which it is a monument. The Buonapartists call it an imitation of the arch of Septimius Severus, but in truth it is only a parody: utility or propriety it has none; because, though just at the entrance of a great palace, one can hardly contrive to pass under it, without going out of the way for the mere purpose of doing so. Its composition is the most perplexed and artificial, and its materials and decoration the most tawdry that can be imagined. White marble and green marble, stone pillars with metal capitals, leaden Victories and bronze horses, Grecian allegories and French grenadiers, are all jumbled together to form this paltry trinket, which reminds us of Lord Hervey's description of Chiswick, that it was too small for use, and too large to hang to one's watch-chain:' and to crown the ridicule, this triumphal arch is stuck down in the midst of a square of buildings, from the first floor windows of which it is absolutely looked down upon.

6

On the summit of the arch stand the Victories aforesaid, leading the famous Venetian horses, which are yoked to a car of gilt lead, destined to receive a gilt-leaden statue of the emperor; the particularity with which this intended statue is described in one of the French descriptions of this monument, as already existing, is an amusing specimen of the style of Buonaparte's flatterers:

'Les deux figures qui retiennent les chevaux, le char et la figure qu'on doit y mettre et que la reconnoissance y place déjà, SONT en plomb doré.'

Thus it would seem, that the future statue was already finished, and an abstract idea is described as being actually cast of molten lead.

A still more amusing and characteristic trait, is the calembourg to which this absent statue gave occasion- Où est donc,' said a spectator, pointing to the empty car, où est donc Napoléon-le char l'attend?' (charlatan.) It must be owned that it was scarcely possible to describe the busy and tawdry presumption of the author of this arch by a more appropriate name; and for such a mountebank there could be no fitter stage than this building.

We have no doubt that it will be taken down; in its present po

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sition

t

sition it offends alike the eye of loyalty and good taste, and common sense and common decency equally demand its removal.

It would be absurd to deny that the Quays of Paris are among its principal beauties, but it is equally true that they are altogether the design, and in much the greater part the work of the Bourbon sovereigns; Buonaparte has, indeed, continued those works, and has made considerable progress in execution of a decree of Lewis XV. for constructing a quay from the Pont Royal to the Esplanade of the Invalides, and a farther continuance of this work round to the Pont de Jena was projected and begun. But, really, it is not by such works as these that the lofty title of 'Creator of Paris' is to be vindicated. Nobody ever thought of extravagantly extolling the Bourbons for an improvement so obvious in its conception and so easy of execution; and yet all Europe is to ring with Buonaparte's praises because he has executed some hundred additional yards of his predecessor's plan!

Of the fountains which he has erected, there is but one deserving of any praise, that of the Boulevard de Bondy near the Porte St. Martin; all the rest are either grossly absurd or absolutely mean; and this very subject of the fountains affords a very striking instance of the manner in which Buonaparte has been praised for labours not his own.'

M. Moisy's book of the engravings of Les Fontaines de Paris (which we have already mentioned) is adorned with a fine engraved frontispiece, with this inscription in capital letters,' Nov

VELLES FONTAINES ERIGE ES A PARIS DE L'ORDRE ET PAR LA MUNIFICENCE DE NAPOLEON LE GRAND;' and then follows, in small characters, 'on y a joint toutes celles existentes antérieurement à son règne.'

Now, our readers will scarcely believe, that of upwards of eighty fountains, of which this fine book gives views and descriptions, not one-fourth part has been erected in the time of Napoléon; upwards of sixty attest the magnificence and good taste of the kings, less than twenty belong to the emperor; of which, as we have said, almost all are in a style, which the notes of this very work admit to be wretched; and here it is but just to observe, that so far is M. Amaury Duval from meriting Mr. Shepherd's blundering accusation of being time-serving,' that he deserves great credit for the good taste and courage with which, in a work, which his coadjutor appears to have dedicated to the emperor's vanity, he has told the honest truth, that few of his fountains are fit to be seen, and the great majority are only little spouts good for nothing but filling water buckets. Of that dedicated to Dessaix, in the Place Dauphine, even his hircling writers acknowledged that 'élevée à la gloire d'un grand capitaine elle paraît peu digne de sa destination;'

and

and it is scarcely possible to find a more striking instance of lofty promise and mean performance than in a decree published by Buonaparte at Mosco for erecting, in frout of the stately church of Saint Sulpice at Paris, that little building, devoid of all character and proportion, which his imperial Majesty was pleased to denominate the Fountain of Peace. Here also it is proper to add, as illustrative of his taste in public monuments, that he had erected in the Place des Victoires a statue of Dessaix, so extravagantly bad, that it was, by his own order, planked up from the public view and indignation. Let us now examine his four bridges. Le Pout de la Cité replaces an old wooden bridge which connected the islands de la Cité and St. Louis. Louis XV. by his letters patent of April, 1769, destined a stone bridge of a single arch for this situation-Buonaparte has built a bridge of two arches, composed of stone, timber, iron, and plaster, in so bad a taste as to be offensive to the eye, and of such wretched execution that long before he was exiled, it was condemned and shut up as impassable.

The Pont des Arts is composed of stone piers, iron arches, and wooden planking, and intended for foot passengers only; of whom, however, no great number make use of it; deterred, probably, by a toll by which the munificent Napoleon the Great' endeavoured to reimburse his expenses. As an object of taste, nothing, in our opinion, can be much worse than this little bridge, either with regard to its effect on the river, or as compared with the solid architectural masses of the Louvre and the Collège des Quatre Nations, as a communication between which it is placed.

The Pont d'Austerlitz is at the eastern extremity of Paris, as that of Jena is at the western, and we are much inclined to attribute both to Buonaparte's vanity rather than to a sense of their utility, as the remoteness of their situation (they are actually out of town) renders them of little comparative use at present. The Pont d'Austerlitz is composed of stone piers and iron arches, and as an architectural object is far from handsome; but it must be confessed that the Pont de Jena, which is the only stone bridge with which Buonaparte has adorned Paris, is a very fine work. Its situation, though not essentially conducing to public convenience, is well chosen with reference to the point of view, and we readily admit that it forms a noble entrance to the Champ de Mars.

Of the new portico to the Palais Bourbon, (the Chamber of Deputies,) it is impossible to deny the striking effect as seen from the Pont Royal or the opposite quays; but, as a French critic has very well remarked, 'it is quite incongruous with all the rest of the building,' and you too plainly see that it is a portico which leads to nothing.'

We have now completed the account of the works executed by Buonaparte

Buonaparte-no very magnificent catalogue, considering the omnipotence of despotism, and the absolute contempt with which Buonaparte overleaped all public forms or private rights which could impede the execution of even his wildest intentions. Of those in progress, or in imagination, we shall not have much to say: a palace for the king of Rome, of which the foundations even were not laid, but of which we are told Paris was already proud,'-A triumphal arch at l'Etoile de Neuilly, begun in 1806, but not yet carried as high as the spring of the arch-A column on the Pont Neuf, of which, (though the prints of it, as of the rest, are already published,) not even a stone is laid; and in fact the intention was not a column, but an obelisk :-A bronze elephant, (who was to spout through his trunk water which was to be supplied from a castle on his back,) of which the model in plaster is finished,-A north gallery between the Thuilleries and Louvre, of which about one-fourth is built, and which, if ever completed, must be, from the want of parallelism, and symmetry between the buildings which it is to unite, awkward and incongruous,*-A temple of glory on the site of the Madelaine; but little or nothing has been added to the preparations for that church commenced by Lewis XVI.-All these our readers will see are little more than the useless abortions of the man's vanity, and, except the exchange, the four or five new slaughter-houses, and the new wine-market, none of the unfinished works pretend even to public utility: the removal of the slaughterhouses from the city took place under the administration of Sartines, and the merit of that arrangement, though arrogated by Buonaparte, belongs to him no more than the building of the Louvre.

If, indeed, we were to believe appearances, Buonaparte built not only the Louvre, but all Paris; for he has every where caused his monogram, that is, the letter N, to be placed; and the works of Henry IV., Lewis XIII. and XIV., have been scraped and painted, and, every where, within and without, covered with the ensigns of Buonaparte: never was jest more true than that to which this profusion of his monogram gave rise, Il a des N mis par-tout.'‡ He had the astonishing insolence to cause to be inscribed on the

*This was commenced under Louis XIV. but was discontinued on account of the incongruities alluded to. We quite agree with M. Boutard, that this new gallery will encumber, rather than adorn, the Carousel; and that it would have been much better to have left this esplanade open to the arcades of the Rue de Rivoli.

· Paris, Dec. 15, 1764.

Since the first of this month all the slaughter-houses have been removed to the Isle des Cygnes, below the capital: from time immemorial the butchers used to slay and prepare the meat on the Quai des Gèvres, one of the most populous parts of the city, and the regulation, now at last effected, has been nearly a century in agitation.'-Vide Gentleman's Magazine for 1764.

The lady tourist blunders this jest into N est mis par-tout:' a version of it which it is impossible she could have heard from a Parisian.

Louvre,

Louvre, Napoleon finished the Louvre'; though, in fact, it was not, and is not, finished, and his additions to that building were inconsiderable, one of the greatest being a church dedicated beforehand to Saint Napoléon. This is of a piece with the audacity (which we observed upon in a former Number) of claiming for hin the praise of having planned and executed the works at Cherbourg, which had been planned by Lewis XIV., and in progressive execution under his successors.

These, then, are the claims of Buonaparte to the title of CREATOR OF PARIS; a city in which Europe admired, before he was born, almost every edifice which at this hour is worthy of admiration: quays, bridges, fountains, monuments, triumphal arches, temples and palaces, before which, in number, utility, taste and splendour, the half dozen tawdry ostentations of Buonaparte sink into insignificance.

Mr. Shepherd and Mr. Wansey, and such persons, are astounded by the gallery of the Louvre, and the wonders which the exemperor collected there; and we are not at all inclined to deny that he spared no exertion of robbery and rapine to increase this collection; but it is equally true that the design of a national museum, or the appropriation to this purpose of the galleries of the Louvre, (thickly as he has covered the ceilings with N N,) belongs not to Buonaparte. This had long been the destination of the Louvre, and though the Parisians may thank Buonaparte's sword for the possession of the Apollo or the Transfiguration, they must not attribute to his genius and taste the design or foundation of this national collection.

**

Let us not, however, be misrepresented as falling into the contrary error to that which we reprove. We do not deny that, in Buonaparte's time, much has been done for the improvement of Paris and of France: a few commercial, and a great number of military works have been accomplished; two or three canals, many roads, and some bridges, have improved the internal communication of the country; and in Paris, one or two new streets have been opened, the markets have been multiplied and rendered more commodious, and two or three of the works, which he has erected in that city, contribute to its splendour. He also repaired and refurnished, for his own use, several of the royal palaces which the revolution had devastated; and his selfish ambition rendered him the instrument of great advantages to France by obliterating the traces of the Revolution, and bringing back the public mind to sentiments

* The inferior galleries had even been appropriated by letters patent of Henry IV. for the residences and workshops of men of science, and artists of all descriptions-a munificence which they enjoyed under his royal successors.- -Vide Pigoniol Descript. He Paris, tom. ii. p. 159.

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