The Express.
London, England, 1864-08-17 00:00:00

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Ms DAY =ion ILilti.7.77•lltetsio. lb. 44=
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LONDON, WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 17.

No people travel so much abroad as the Eng-
lish, especially in the hot months of the year; no
people are so little skilled in speaking any lan-
guage but their own ; and no people run so much
after scenery, parka, palaces, and picture-galleries.
The Rhine during August and September is as
much an English" silent highway" as the Thames
between London and Gravesend, and Paris re-
ceives every week in the short tourist season from
twenty to a hundred thousand English visitors.
When the thermometer in that delightful city
stands at a hundred degrees in the shade, and all
the chief theatres are closed, and dogs, under a
penalty payable by their owners of many francs
of fine, are compelled to drag on • miserable
existence with their mouths fastened in tin-
canisters or wire-baskets, and when every Pa-
risian who can scrape together • few napo-
leons is away at some sandy watering-place
or leafy Spa, then a few favoured districts of Paris
are flooded with British tourists. Americaos, com-
mercial travellers, and French provincials are there
to keep them company, but the pleasure-meeting
English are the people who take visible possession
of nearly all the chief shows, bazaars, and boule-
vards. Like the ordinary French in London,
however, they seldom move beyond • certain
circle. It is true, they have no quarter as
thoroughly English as Leicester-square with its
tributaries is French, but they move in a beaten
track marked out for them by guide-books, and
see little of the real city and leas of the real
people. There are streets in Paris--in spite of
the " improvements "—in which au Englishman is
never seen, and where he would be stared at like
a white man at Timbuctoo. There are men and
women in Paris whose ways of life are as un-
known to the British tourist as the habits of the
Fans or Aztecs. The tomb of NAPOLEON, the gal-
leries of the Louvre, the waters of Versailles, the
I churches, the Champs Elya*See, &dancing garden like
Mabille, perhaps • theatre or two, and certainly a
circus, some half-dozen hotels, and about as many
caf4s, form the ordinary travelling Englishman's
Paris. At the hotels he meets none but his
compatriots ; and though he sits upon French fur-
niture, and skate& upon a waxed floor, he is waited
upon by Germans or Swiss, who speak a kind of
talkee-talkee English ; be is fed with legs of mut-
ton and " trimmings," cooked in the supposed
British manner, and he drinks windy British
bottled beer in preference to the wine of the coun-
try. When be moves from place to place it is
generally in a solitary phaeton, with his nationality
I wrapped round him like a cloak, or in a first-class
railway carriage, where he finds no one but his
countrymen.

This " Rule Britannia" style of travelling is not
calculated to remove many illusions and dispel
many prejudices, but still it is better than no tra-
velling at all. Few, even amongst the moat bigoted
Englishmen, now believe that all classes of
Frenchmen are fed upon thin soup and sour wine,
and that they eat frogs when they require more
solid nourishment. Something more than • sus-
picion has now got hold of the British mind that
frogs are as much • luxury in France as turtles
are in England. The belief fostered by carica-
turists at the beginning of the century, that French-
men are • nation of scraggy dancing-masters,
has faded away, with many other vulgar errors,
after fifty years of observation. A large num-
ber of such mistaken notions, however, still pre-
vail, and these will probably never be got rid of
until travellers travel a little more philosophically.
The worst preparation for a foreign journey is to
start with an assumption that you are about to
visit some very curious people, whose manners are
strange, quaint, and peculiar, and unlike anything
else in the world. The British tourist, no matter
where he may be going to, will do well to cherish
a conviction that mankind are pretty much alike
in all countries. The differences which exist are
differences of condition, not of nature. A careful
study of these differences of condition may save
the British tourist from jumping to many hasty,
■weeping, and unjust conclusions. For example,
we hear far too much in this country about the
"dirty foreigner." We are too apt to crow about
our superior cleanliness, because our bedrooms are
not furnished with milk jugs and sugar basins in-
stead of good-sized washing apparatus. This is
taken as evidence that the foreigner has no taste
for a clean skin, not only by our new school of
fanatics who look upon the tub as the one thing
needful, but by people who make very little use of
cans and footbatha. Why one " foreigner"
should be unlike another foreigner—for the Eng-
lish, strange as it may seem, are foreigners in rela-
tion to the French—is never explained, and the
statement stands only as a broad assertion, sus-
tained by and sustaining a diseased national pride.
It is never remembered that Paris—we will still
keep to France—has an atmosphere of so much
higher purity than London, by reason of its wood
fires, that the difference is as great as that between the
atmospheres of London and the Potteries. It is
never remembered that the water supply of the
Paris houses is very defective, and that this is
counterbalanced, in some measure, by the con-
veniences for bathing in the Seine. In no city are
the baths so numerous and cheap ; and it is just
possible that a people who probably bathe more
than the English, and who are not made so dirty