DIARY A LOUNGER IN A FRENCH CABINET DE LECTURE.

Feb. 15th. The pettiness of small states is remarkable. The Canton of Bak, proud of its position in the political world, refuses to permit sealed paektits of letters to cross its numerous square leagues of dominion into Zurich. The consequence is, that the French post has been obliged to make an agreement with Zurich to forward such packets of letters by the romede about way of the Duchy of Baden.

Another volume has just been added to the Memoirs of Groxixt and Dimmer. It contains the portions of M S. suppressed dui•ing the Imperial reign.

SOUTHEY'S History of the Peninsular War—The demand for books must be great in France, in order to enable the parties to afford the expense of publishing a translation of this bulky performance. We in Englandcannot carry through translations of this voluminous character, unless indeed tlx author has obtained a European reputation.

18th. The piece of Henri 1.11,.vhiell appears to have met with considerable success in Paris, has been sold to a bookseller for 9000f. Mr Dcarvs. is the author.

A farmer at Bonnebosq, perceiving that he was robbed of his bread in the night, concealed himself in his oven, taking along with [din a loaded musket. In the dead of the niedit the robber opened the oven-door. M. Vesque, the farmer, fired, and the thief was shot through the hip. He fled, but was found in a field by his pursuers, and shortly after died. He asked for bread, ant? they gave hint a bullet.

The prison of Valenciennes is in such reputation, that there is a struggle among people discontented with their homes to get into it. A woman who had spent several nights in a sentry-box (it was ('mpty) determined to change for the better. She fixed upon a house opposite the 1)Am-office, and commenced breaking windows : she persevered till her wishes WV re gratified, and she was installed in an agreeable apartment in the House of Correction.

21st. Mr. JANIE*: LEFEYItE stibmitteil some propositions to the Chamber of Deputies, with it view to regulate their discussions. Ile laid it down that " every speaker should be permitted to consult his notes" (a laugh) in the irregular part of the debate which precedes and follows the budgets °reach Minister, but that in the occasional discussions written speeches should not be allowed. N. de Co RCELLES opposed the regulation, as inconvenient. He observed that the House reckoned among its members a great number of distinguished orators, many of whom had been practised in speaking extemporarily on the most arduous suhiects of debate ; " and yet (he said) I ask whether the most able of them can, without preparation, speak concerning all kinds of' questions ? Would not their constituents be alarmed at such rashness ? I.et us leave these things as they are ; let us learn to accustom ourselves to long speeches: if tbey appear too long, there remains the resource of not listening to :Item." (d general laugh.) This will sound somewhat strange to English ears. M. ALES:. DE Letuonne expres4ed himself on the question with good sense : he observed, that like other things, written speeches had their advantages and disadvantages ; and as members became more accustomed to debate, the practice of writing speeches would go out. In the mean time they had the effect of accustoming members to the usage,of the tribune ; which, though it might he to some the tripod of the Pythoness, was the true Medusa's head to others.

Al. LAnortoe alluded to those members who, like the Duke of NEWCASTLE , feel their ideas ooze away as they rise to speak. It is lucky for us, that the practice.of written speeches does not prevail, otherwise the noble lords, so ready with their pen and so lumbering with their tongues, would beat " the Duke" out of the field by the mere force of writing. 22d. A petition has been presented to the Chambers, in the true spirit of the Revolution. It is on the behalf of one Sieur C Lover of Lyons, who complains, that in that city there are numerous individuals who bear titles and assume names to which they have no legal right. He included in his petition a list of thirty such individuals. One of them, the Mayer of Lyons, is a deputy, and was present: he calls himself, M. de Lacroix-Laval ; and he defended his right to his name—it was the one, he said, which his father bore, and which brought upon hint the Revolutionary axe. M. MECHIN observed, with some point, that this malady of a love of names and titles was an old and incurable one—that the corrective to be applied was not the force of the law, but the force of ridicule.

23d. The Director of the Roads and Bridges in France has determined to • macadamize some of the French roads, by way of experiment.

24th. The translator of limner, M:DueAse Mosereeie has just written an able dissertation on the carriitee of merchaudise throughout France. M. de la MARTIN E (the Byron of our neighbours) a short tune ago drew up the petition of the proprietors of vineyards in the Maconnais. This is considered an evidence of the great interest which is now taken all over France, in the welfare of commerce and manufactures. And justly so. As far as we can judge from the aptitude of the French for business, and from the decided tendency towards these pursuits as well as other considerations, France will in half a century be considered at least the second, if not the first manufacturing people of Europe. -51. THIERIOT is spoken of as the successor of Al. GAIL in the Aca• dewy. He is well known in England as the author of the history of the Norman Conquest. It is said that his excessive labour upon this work has deprived him of his eye-sight: we may, however, be very sure that his eves never could have been of the most durable character. Compared with the researches of such writers as LINGARD and HALLAM, his labour must have been in the proportion of ploughirbes a field and clearing an extensive forest. We remember that M. Till ERRY'S blindness, or perhaps rather his extreme shortsightedness, was considered at the time at Paris as a moyen de sneers—as a recommendation of his book. We do not deny that M. To u ERRS' is an ingenious and an industrious man ; his hook is moreover written in a popular spirit, worthy of the applause of the lovers of liberty. There are serious riots at La Flfiche. The poor ignorant people, in want of bread, blame the corn-factors : they threaten them with hanging, and all sorts of deaths; they surround them in their houses, and drive them into the granaries. The mob will not permit a load of corn to leave the commune. The communale police is totally. inefficient ; and until attention was generally excited hy these riots, the mob had complete command of the county. The chief authority promised the corn should not leave the commune, and that it should be sola at five francs the bushel—a price far below the market. Sixteen persons have since been arrested. These scenes have also taken place in other quarters. — There are at this moment upwards of 200 leagues of finished canal, and from 250 to 300 leagues of unfinished canal ; there are 35 leagues of iron railways ; finished or in progress, 8000 leagues of King's high-tools, 7000 of county roads. The surface of England is only two-lifths of that of France; it has 9500 leagues of turupike-road, a great extent of navigable rivers, (rain 1200 to 1500 leagues of internal canals, and more than 100 of iron railways, without mentioning the facility of transport by sea along the coasts.

24th. The King of BAVARIA has turned author. COTTA is about to publish a collection of his Majesty's poems.

— The pupils of the riding-school in Rue Montmartre give an equestrian fete for the benefit of the Mendicity Society. It concludes with a masked countrydance on horseback.

— The sketches of the English Parliamentary debates are made with considerable fuluess, and no little taste, in the French papers : we can single

out the Journal des Debuts for its excellence in this respect. The summary of the leading articles of our journals is likewise cleverly executed. The favourite journal for extract is the Times.

25th. The Gazette des Tribunaux tells the following curious story at some length. A voiturier on the road from Bourg to Geneva;on approaching

the latter city, overtook a poor woman, who, apparently overcome with fatigue, begged of him to give her a ride. He admitted her; she wrapped herself about with some straw, and fell asleep, snoring loudly. At the foot of a steep hill, a very short distance from Geneva, the coachman took off the drag-chain, (or iron shoe) and threw it into the coach : being so near the town, he did not himself remount, but walked to the gates. On arriving there, he called out to his only passenger, the poor woman, to wake her, and give notice that she had arrived at her journey's end. No answer was given, and atlast the coachman got in and gave her a shake : he found she was a corpse. The surgeon and assistants were called : it was found that she had died of a blow on the temple by some blunt instrument. The unhappy coachman had killed the object of his charity with the iron drag shoe.

On further investigation, it moreover appeared that the woman was a man, and not only a man' but armed with a poniard and a brace of pistols. A note was also found upon him ; it was a rendezvous to meet at a certain house in the suburbs of Geneva, where he would find his friends and abundance of plunder. The police set a watch upon the spot, and were lucky enough to seize nine individuals. The proprietor of the chateau was an old man of considerable wealth ; he has settled an annuity upon the homicide voiturier.

26th. The Duc de LEVIS has dedicated the second edition of his " Conspiration de 1821," to Sir WALTER SCOTT; not venturing, as he says, to address the illustrious Scotsman before the success of his work had been assured. He pays Sir WALTER this handsome compliment : " It has been my lot, in the course of a tolerably long life, to have been acquainted with men whose names will endureas long as history : I have known, among others, the great Feemint ice and NAroLEON: but it has been in you alone that! have met with the sublime combination of genius and goodness." The Duke has recently been on a visit to Sir Weure K.

27th. The question of divorce is at present agitated in the StateeGeneral of the Netherlands. The new code forbids divorce on the ground of mutual consent ; and this doctrine has been impugned by M. de LUZAC, who entered into some curious details on the subject. In the Netherlands, from 1815 to 1825, there have been out of 430,000 marriages, 605 divorces, a proportion which gives one divorce in 711 couples. Dividing the provinces into North and South according to their religion, in the Northern provinces divorces are 1 to 327 marriages ; whereas in the Southern provinces, the ratio is 1 to 3317. However, Northern Brabant is, after Western Flanders, the province in which conjugal harmony is most rarely disturbed ; for in it there has been but one divorce, while in Liege and Hainault 78 marriages have been legally dissolved.

March 1st. The papers of to-day contain three animated discussions on interesting questions. The first relates to the punishment of death for forgery. N. de TRACY ventured to maintain the opinion that society had no right to punish with death at all. " I do not hesitate to declare," said he, " as a citizen, a deputy, and speaking under correction of more experienced men, whose philanthropy and enlightenment I respect, that I contest the right of society to inflict the pain of death." (Violent murmurs on the right, and a prolonged interruption.) It seemed, however, a pretty general opinion that in cases of forgery, coining, and some others, the punishment of death had been too freely used, and, as in England, had contributed to the escape of criminals. M. CHARLES Doris; in the second discussion, maintained that a change should be made in the Government pawnbroking establishment, corresponding to that in the lottery. He seemed to consider that these two establishments were nearly connected ; and in fact inferred, from the near equality of the sum staked in the lottery, and that obtained on pledge at Mont de Piete, that persons never pawned their property except to buy lottery-tickets. Now, he says, three francs is the lowest sum to be obtained at Mont de Pike ; the lowest price of a ticket is two francs ; consequently the person pawning has still the means of buying into the lottery, and a franc to spare for any other bad purpose. The zeal of M. CHARLES Doris seems to carry him beyond the limits of discretion : this is the deputy who in the Mechanic's Institute inveighed so bitterly against theatres. The third discussion was respecting the conduct of the Procureur do Roi of Domfront. The widow and children of M. Bearnmeo, in the cemetery of Carneille, near Domfront, had raised a monument to the memory of that gentleman. The inscription bore, that " in him the country lost one of its best citizens, and liberty one of its most zealous defenders.' Now M. BERTRAND had been a Conventionalist, and voted the death of the King : this inscription, therefore, though it had been placed on the tomb six years, was not any longer to be tolerated. The Procureur duRoi, a young man, took with him a brigade of gendarmes, and with hammer and chisel erased the eulogy of the Republican. The widow found no redress in the courts below, and presented a petition to the Chamber. Her petition was rejected ; and, though well supported, the speakers all seemed animated by a spirit of truckling to the present power—there was not one who dared attack the Proeureur on the true e The French must not, however, forget that they are the children of the Revolution—that they owe nearly every political blessing to it and whatever may have been its unhappy stages there is no reaching the top of the ladder if the middle steps are left out Of the machine.

'2nd. The following is a French mode of describing the crime of coining: they seem to have imitated the elegance of our police reports:— " A young woman, whose graceful carriage, elegant and foreign costume, contrasted strangely with the dock into which a dreadful necessity had led her, and two men to whom fortune seemed to have promised a more happy destiny, were summoned the 19th of last month, before the jury of the BasPyrenees. All three were Spaniards: a deplorable reaction had compelled them to fly their country, and they found nothing in France but misery. The shartespur of want urged them to a deed, of the fatal consequences of which they were ignorant : in order to procure bread, they uttered some forged pieces of thirty sous," S;c, Mcmorial