PARIS. By Sidney Dark. With Drawings by Henry Rushbury, A.R.W.S.
(Macmillan. 25s.)—Mr. Sidney Dark has made no attempt to give a picture of Paris in words ; he wisely left that to his illustrator, Mr. Rushbury, who catches with extraordinary success the characteristic aspects—the formality relieved by a sparkling brilliance of movement and atmosphere, and the recurring mixture of beautiful old Gothic among the straight lines and square angles of post- Renaissance work. And, of course, the river is there all the ,time. What a reproach it is to England to see how the French use water for beauty ! Almost every great English town turns its back on the element it lives by; whereas ports like Bordeaux, Marseilles and Toulon have been instinctively shaped so as to make the whole centre on the sea front. London, a merchant town, lined its river with wharfs ; Paris, a town of government, set the Seine flowing between palaces. Even when London tried to amend by the Embankment, it was impossible to alter the essential disposition. Mr. Dark's 'object has been to people the streets of Paris for his reader with their historic associations to call up the image of 'those individual persons or groups who once walked, worked, slew and were slain there. Rightly, he ranks creatures of the imagination as real beings : memories of Dumas are everywhere with him. One may wish that he had not a little neglected Balzac, and that he had reminded us where the Pere Goriot boarded, and where his daughters had their 'splendid mansions ; and he really might have fixed for us the site of Cesar Birotteau's shop. But this is cavilling at a pleasant, readable and instructive book, admirably produced.
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