for alarm, than is generally to be found at the bottom of a popular panic.

Saturday, the of January, was fixed for the evening of our descent. It was a cold, clear night, of unusual brilliancy, for the latitude of Paris. A couple of fiacres were ordered to be in attendance at seven, and we rose from the dinner table to prepare for our visit. It was the night of the first great ball of the season at the Tuilleries; and as we drove through the Place du Carousel, the bril liant illumination of the vast suite of apartments, which extend the whole length of the palace, made me almost regret that I had given up so splendid a spectacle, for the gloomy visit on which we were bound. Crossing the Seine, we directed our course through the Quartier Latin and the Faubourg St. Jacques, toward the Barrière, beyond which, at a house the number of which had been given to us, we were directed to inquire for the person appointed to accompany us to these regions of the dead, to which we were hurrying with an impatience seldom exhibited, even by those whom an inexorable necessity compels to such a journey. Descending the principal street of one of those villages of laborers to be found at almost every gate leading from the city, we drew up in front of a neat three story building, which bore the number we were in search of. One of our drivers gave a pull at the bell. In a few minutes the guide made his appearance. He requested us to drive a few hundred yards to a shop farther on, at which we quitted our carriages, leaving them with orders to the coachmen to await our return. Here we procured a supply of wax candles, of the peculiar construction used by workmen, and others visiting the catacombs. Proceeding some distance farther down the principal street, now become an open road, we turned to the left, and entered a narrow alley, enclosed on either side by high walls. We were now some distance beyond the village; we had left the last houses and lights behind us; and began to feel, as we entered this lonely and desolate avenue, that we had already passed from the region of the living. Not a tree nor a house was to be seen; nothing but the two long, unbroken walls, which stretched before us across the fields, dead and cold, and presenting an appearance in perfect keeping with the spot to which they led. The moon itself seemed to throw an unearthly light over the uncultivated waste. We walked with rapid steps, which the coolness of the evening made necessary to our comfort, a few hundred yards along this alley, when the guide suddenly stopped, unlocking a door in the wall on our left. We entered an uncovered yard, some sixty feet square, in one corner of which was a small brick house, covering the entrance to the catacombs. The door of this little building being unfastened, we entered a small unplastered apartment, and were not displeased to exchange the nipping cold of the open air, for the comfortable warmth proceeding from the vaults below. The door being carefully locked from within, as soon as the necessary preparation of lighting our candles was completed, we commenced the descent, the guide preceding us. A winding stairway of stone, scarcely wide enough to admit a single person of extraordinary size, leads, by a flight of some eighty or ninety steps, to the vaults. We found ourselves, on reaching the bottom, in a broad, irregular passage, with a black

line, painted on the rough ceiling of stone, pointing out a direct course to the entrance of the great city of the dead. It is supposed that the bones of more than three millions of people are collected in this vast charnel-house, but the space occupied by them forms a very small portion of the quarries under the city. These excavations compose a series of passages, from fifteen to twenty feet in width, and ten or twelve in height, running in every possible direction, and intersecting each other so frequently, and at angles so irregular, as to render it absolutely impossible to find one's way, but by the aid of some such contrivance as a line painted on the ceiling. We proceeded some distance along one of these passages, before reaching the portal of the great cemetery. An appropriate inscription reminded us that we had arrived at the awful limits of this dread abode of the dead. We passed within. Piles of human bones, several feet deep, reached on either hand from the floor to the ceiling. A peculiar but not offensive smell, which I fancied to proceed from these great masses of mouldering bones, ossa non inodora, left an impression on my nerves I shall scarcely ever forget. We wandered through these passages, examining, with a curious attention, that quite exhausted the patience of our guide, every object that we passed. Innumerable inscriptions, from Latin and French poets, among whom Virgil and J. B. Rousseau seemed the greatest favorites, some full of tenderness and regret, others of a more philosophizing but equally melancholy turn, caught our eyes wherever we turned.

The air of this subterranean world was of balmy softness; the surface on which we walked dry and smooth; and if one could be reconciled to the mute society of this unliving multitude, and to the endless night which pervades a region where the sun never shone, and from which the face of heaven is for ever shut out, it would be difficult to select a more enviable habitation. For some time I found it absolutely impossible to rid myself of the strange feelings excited by so novel a situation. Enclosed in the very bosom of the earth, deep buried beneath the possibility of human assistance, our little party was surrounded by three millions of the dead! I felt that the most frivolous curiosity had led us to violate, with irreverent steps, the solemn repose of the grave. I looked upon myself as a criminal; and shuddered as I thought upon the dreadful punishment that might await our impious rashness. 1 amagined every instant that I should see the long buried ghosts of the millions around me, rising from the dead, to avenge our sacrilegious presence. I was overwhelmed with terror; I strained my ears to catch the faintest sound; I fixed my eyes upon a skull, to see if its hideous features changed their fixed grin of death. Not a sound was heard; nothing moved; the silence of the vaults was unbroken, save by the distant footsteps of our party, who were by this time some distance before me. I was safe. The iron hand of Death held down the vast multitude around me! How mighty is his power!

The great mass of bones in these catacombs were brought from the cemeteries within the walls of Paris, before the first revolution. It has never been a place of private interment. The remains of those who were murdered on the memorable tenth of August, and in one or two other of the more dreadful massacres of the revolution,

are deposited here; their bones are not exposed to view. A separate vault, closely walled up, contains the remains of the victims of each of these massacres. A brief inscription records the time and

manner of their death.

The spirit of collecting seems to have invaded even these dismal caverns. In the arrangement of the bones, a selection was made of such as exhibited peculiar formation; and they have been carefully preserved in a museum. The guide conducted us to this interesting collection. We found it carefully laid out on shelves, in a chamber cut from the solid rock. Here were certainly specimens of the most curious distortions; skulls of a construction to afford inexpressible delight to any node-fingering disciple of Gall; and I am not entirely satisfied that some of them may not even now be attracting the attention of the learned upon the upper earth; for one of our party, a student of medicine, appeared to me to betray a very suspicious interest in this exhibition; and I soon after observed him arranging the folds of his cloak in a manner that was far from dissipating any doubt I might have previously entertained of his intentions.

In a quarter remote from the stairway by which we entered, is a plan of the city and harbor of Mahon, with its fortifications, as they existed about the middle of the last century, cut from the rock by a soldier, who had been many years a prisoner of war in that town. He is said to have employed more than seven years in the execution of this wretched task, passing every day from ten to twelve hours in his solitary occupation. The work is rude, but is said to be exact. I confess that this spot excited my interest, for it spoke eloquently of the desolate misery of man. This poor hermit had served the better part of his life in the armies of France; he had been scarred, maimed, imprisoned, for years. He had hoped, perhaps, to pass the remainder of his days in his own beloved country, in ease and happiness, in the bosom of his family, descending full of honor to the grave. He returned; but alas! what a picture does this vain employment and hideous solitude not exhibit of ruined hopes, of disappointed affections, of bereavement, of utter nakedness and desolation of heart! What could man, or woman, or lisping childhood, or the sweet face of nature, have been to him, who, from no affectation of misanthropy, but from the mere impulse of the heart, could thus withdraw himself from the earth, to live buried in the frightful gloom of these unvisited vaults, amid death, and solitude, and eternal night! What a consciousness was here, of the emptiness of life, of the vanity of its ambition, of its labors and cares! What was the surly cynicism of Diogenes to this! What think ye of the poetical philosophy of the wisest of men is there such a lesson in the proverbs of the Jewish monarch? Which was blessed with the 'fortem animum, et mortis terrore carentem,' the poor hermit of the catacombs, or the king of kings?

Turning in another direction, we passed a place where the earth had fallen in, and the broken rocks lay one upon another, as if the accident had occurred but a few days before. On a closer inspection, this appeared evidently not the case. I inquired with surprise why this breach had not been repaired; but the guide could give no ex

planation of the reasons which had caused it to be left in so insecure a condition. Here and there 1 observed occasional marks of recent work; but I confess it did not strike me that much labor had been expended in any part of the vaults through which we passed, or that there was any danger attending a visit to them, sufficient to justify the exclusion of the public. I concluded it was in the vast quarries beyond the limits of the burial place, that the danger was to be found; and that there perhaps workmen were employed in rebuilding and strengthening the foundations of the city, There was no temptation to visit those dark passages, in which we should have had to scramble over blocks of loose stone, exposed perhaps to atmospheres of the most fatal gases; and I never ascertained the truth of my conjecture.

We still wandered on, among avenues lined with bones, built up with the same monotonous regularity. We perceived that our course led, with a rapid inclination, deeper into the earth. We had not proceeded very far, before we found ourselves at the top of a flight of broad steps; descending these, we discovered, at the extremity of a long passage, a spring of the purest water, collected in a basin hollowed in the rock. We held our tapers over its surface, smooth as glass, and counted the pebbles that covered its bottom. Not a breath of air had ever ruffled its placid surface; eternal darkness rested upon its waters, save when the glimmering lights of some wanderers like ourselves were mirrored in its bosom. The guide informed us that numbers of little golden-backed fish had been left in its waters; but they never long survived. The last time he had been here, there were still two or three remaining, of a half dozen left not very long before. But they were no longer to be seen; after some minutes, we discovered the body of one, probably the last to die, floating on the surface. No living thing could long breathe such an atmosphere of darkness and death. Its sunless waters reminded me of the fabulous rivers of the infernal world; and I almost persuaded myself, as I stooped over its brink, that one draught would have steeped my senses in a pleasing oblivion of the world. Perhaps the poor prisoner of Mahon had tasted its Lethean powers.

Our visit lasted several hours, during which we heard nothing of the upper earth, save the occasional rumbling of some heavily-laden wagon, as it passed directly over our heads. We returned along the route we had entered, and were not sorry to feel again the reviving coldness of the open air, and to find ourselves once more upon the earth; a sensation not completely realized, until we had locked the last door upon the catacombs, and were beyond the enclosures of this region of the dead. A TRAVELLER.

LITERARY NOTICES.

PUBLIC AND PRIVATE ECONOMY. Illustrated by Observations made in England, in the year 1836. By THEODORE SEDGWICK. One volume. pp. 210. New-York: HARPER AND BROTHERS.

If this book, in its specific object, were entirely useless, which it is far from being, still it would effect the valuable purpose of showing, that a subject which most people suppose to be confined to high conclaves, abstract thinkers, and Adam Smith, may be naturally, simply, and clearly treated, without any solemn mystification, and learned nonsense. The reader is supposed to be acquainted with things in America, and our author takes him over to England in a packet ship. No sooner is he embarked, than he begins to examine the principles of the facts about him. He journeys through much of England, and his mind is active all the while. He is teaching his pupil political economy at every step; and the man who can read his remarks of sailors, packets, temperance, roads, dress, Christian equality, productive labor, ornament, etc., and find nothing to assent to, or much to blame, will disagree with us. It is an easy book to read. Some, on this account, may think it trite. Some people, not a few, have the idea that every thing which is called learned and useful, a science, must be hard to understand. They think 'the hardest way is the rightest way;' as the man who, ignorant of spelling, trying to spell Peter, did it thus, P-e-a-t-o-u-r, triumphantly; as much as to say, 'Find a harder way than that, if you can!' Now this man, in his lamentable views of orthography, is like many in their notions of religion, science, and art. With them, the hard is the right. But it is generally just the other way. Many persons will read this book, who never would nor could read Adam Smith. If it were possible for people to read it without thinking they were learning political economy, it were better. Our author places productive labor and temperance as the ground work of our national prosperity. These are to bring about that republican, Christian equality, which is the proper destiny of nations. While a man is manufacturing useless trinkets, he is paid for his work, but is not, beyond this, benefitted by his employment. His time is lost to society. But if he be employed in making a road, here too he is paid for his labor, but he has the privilege of using the road; the expense of carriage of produce is lessened; prices are equalized, and so the poor man is benefitted. The trinket is unproductive labor; the road is productive labor. Apply this principle to dress, food, etc. If a man wear garments that do not protect him comfortably, or subserve a good taste, or show off, by their adaptation to his employment, his manliness and dignity, this is unproductive dress. A productive dress is that which keeps him in the best health; suffers him to move with the least fatigue, or one which, by its cost, does not infringe upon his other wants. So too of diet. A productive diet will give him most strength, the best heart, the clearest judgment. Wine and stimulating drinks, which addle the brain, are very unproductive affairs. Simplicity in dress, and temperance in eating and drinking, are no less a man's interest than his Christian duty; indeed the