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Oh! the Roast Beef of Old England! shall be remembered, and--which will be longer still--till the French and English become one people, merely by dint of living, within three hours' journey of each other. Calais has been treated much too cavalierly by the flocks of English, who owe to it their first, and consequently most fixed impressions of French manners, and the English want of them. Calais is, in fact, one of the most agreeable and characteristic little towns in France. It is
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Place in the centre of the town (an entirely open square, of about 150 paces by 100,) you can scarcely look upon a more lively and stirring scene. The houses and their shops (they have all shops) are like nothing so much as so many scenes in a pantomime--so fancifully and variously are they filled, so brightly and fantastically painted, and so abruptly do they seem to have risen out of the ground! This last appearance is caused by the absence of a foot-path, and of areas, porticoes, railings, &c.--such as, in all cases, give a kind of _finish_ to the look of our houses. The houses here seem all to have grown up _out_ of the ground--not to have been built _upon_ it. This is what gives to them their most striking effect of novelty at the first view. Their brilliant and various colourings--so unlike our sombre brick-work--is the next cause of the novel impression they produce. The general strangeness of the effect is completed by the excellence of the pavement, which is of stones, shaped like those of our best London carriage-ways, but as white as marble in all weathers, and as regular as the brick-work of a house-front. The uniformity of the
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Place is broken (not very agreeably) by the principal public edifice of Calais--the Town Hall; a half-modern, half-antique building, which occupies about a third of the south side, and is surmounted at one end by a light spiring belfry, containing a most loquacious ring of bells, which take up a somewhat unreasonable proportion of every quarter of an hour in announcing its arrival; and, in addition, every three hours they play
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for a longer period than (I should imagine) even French patience and leisure can afford to listen to it. Immediately behind the centre of this side of the
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Place also rises the lofty tower, which serves as a light-house to the coast and harbour, and which at night displays its well-known revolving lights. Most of the principal streets run out of this great Square. The most busy of them--because the greatest thoroughfare--is a short and narrow one leading to the Port--(_Rue du Havre_:) in it live all those shopkeepers who especially address themselves to the wants of the traveller. But the gayest and most agreeable street is one running from the north-east corner of the
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Place (_Rue Royale_.) It terminates in the gate leading to the suburbs (_Basse Ville_,) and to the Netherlands and the interior of the country. In this street is situated the great hotel Dessin--rendered famous for the
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of a century or so to come, by _Sterne's Sentimental Journey_. The only other street devoted exclusively to shops is one running parallel with the south side of the
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Place.