Old towers, old belfries, old crosses, slender spires innumerable, rose up amid a world of quaint gables and angular roofs.

Story above story sprang those curious dwellings; irregular yet homogeneous; dear to the painter's and the poet's eye; elaborate in ornament; grotesque in design; well suited to the climate, and admirably adapted to the wants and comforts of the inhabitants; picturesque like the age itself, like its costume, its manners, its literature.

All these characteristic beauties and peculiarities are now utterly gone.

All the old picturesque habitations have been devoured by fire, and a New City has risen in their stead;--not to compare with the Old City, though--and conveying no notion whatever of it--any more than you or I, worthy reader, in our formal, and, I grieve to say it, ill-contrived attire, resemble the picturesque-looking denizens of London, clad in doublet, mantle, and hose, in the time of James the First.
Another advantage in those days must not be forgotten.

The canopy of smoke overhanging the vast Modern Babel, and oftentimes obscuring even the light of the sun itself, did not dim the beauties of the Ancient City,--sea coal being but little used in comparison with wood, of which there was then abundance, as at this time in the capital of France.