Virginia Argus

CARICATURE OF PARIS.

September 25.

"Paris is a place of variety; and Sunday the most various of all its days. The avenue leading from the Place de Carrousel was lined with booths, and those lined with basket of grapes, indecent prints, missals and memoirs with titles as attractive to some kinds of students as repulsive to others. Further on was a shew of wild beasts: next to this a stage with a mountebank in high frolic, with a monkey in a theatrical dress; a few steps onward was a stage of higher pretensions, with a director, who harangued the populace, a wretch in a goat's hair wig, and tarnished coat, who mimicked him, and third and mightiest, a woman, whose merit consisted in letting five men stand at once upon her body, as was fully displayed by a glowing canvas behind. Below, the area was filled by a crowd of strange faces—the smooth English soldier, half wondering and half ashamed; the whiskered Prussian; the Cossack bearded to the waist, and buried in his Persian cap: the Canadian with the yellow skin, sleepy eye and broad cheek bone of the Chinese: the Parisian beggar, with his hair à l'orange, his chapeau bras, and his lower person degenerating into filth indescribable; and from all issuing a clamor of language and wild and barbarous sounds, that perhaps never before assembled in a civilized land."

London paper.