THE VILLE DE PARIS' To THE EDITOR OP THE "
SPECTATOR:* I SIR,—It is evident that neither the French nor the British ship that bore the name of the Ville de Paris' could have supplied material for Astley's Pavilion, since the former foundered in mid-ocean ; the latter, as Mr. Ford tells us, was lying in Hamoaze in 1817. But how is that strange statement in Mr. Baker's " Book on the Stage" to be accounted for ? Now, the Naval histories state that the 'Ville de Paris' was captured by his Majesty's ship Canada,' 74, and if it happened that that ship was sold out of the service and broken up about the time when the Pavilion was being set up, and that Astley, when he purchased the timber, heard for the first time the story of Rodney's victory, which happened twenty-three years before, some confusion in the names of the captor and captured might have been in his mind at the time, and that he com- pleted the purchase under the impression that it was the 'Ville de Paris' and not the ' Canada,' whose timber he was using for his theatre. But I think it may possibly have been that he had met with an old condemned French merchant ship with her name Villa de Paris' painted on her stern, and that the
mistake may have originated in that way. C. B.
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