IMPRIMERIE NATIONALE.

In the year 1552 Francis I. first established in the Louvre an Imprimerie Royale, a portion of which, under the appellation of Imprimerie des Bulletins des Lois, was in 1792 transferred to the Elysée Bourbon, inhabited at present by Prince Louis Napoleon. In 1795 these two establishments were united in the Hôtel de Toulouse, now the bank of France, and in 1809 they were finally transferred to their present locality.

This public establishment is shown to visitors every Thursday, and accordingly, at ten minutes before the hour "precisely " indicated in the ordinary printed permission which, in compliance with the advice contained in Galignani's guidebook, I had obtained, I knocked at its gate, and walking across a court and up a staircase, I was directed to go to the waiting-room, in which I expected to have found a hard stool or two to sit on, and sundry drops and slops of ink on the floor to look at. However, on reaching the landingplace I was shown into a drawing-room hand

somely carpeted, containing four pier-glasses, one on each wall; a scarlet damask ottoman; a scarlet cloth sofa; fourteen scarlet chairs; scarlet curtains; white blinds; and in the middle a fine mahogany table covered with green cloth.

As I was the sole monarch of all I surveyed, I reclined on the sofa, and was admiring the arrangements made everywhere in Paris for the reception of strangers, when the door opened, and in walked a gentleman with two young ladies, who had scarcely looked at themselves-"vue et approuvée "-in the glass almost immediately above me, when in walked four more young ladies and a gentleman, then three middleaged ladies and two gentlemen.

As soon as the clock of the establishment struck, there stood at the door a porter, making dumb signals to us to advance, and accordingly nine bonnets and five black hats hastened towards him into the passage, where we found waiting, and ready to conduct us, an exceedingly pleasing-looking intellectual young man of about twenty years of age. Everybody, excepting myself, appeared to be in tiptop spirits; but as the object of my visit was solely to make myself acquainted with a very important establishment, I could not help for a few moments inwardly groaning when I reflected that a guide of twenty

years of age for thirteen people-were he even to be fairly divided among them all--would be equal only to a sucking tutor rather more than a twelvemonth old for each; besides which, it was but too evident that as my nine sisters, in the exercise of their undoubted prerogative, would very probably not only constantly encircle the young guide, but would each and all at once be continually asking him questions of different degrees of importance, I should not only have no instruction at all, but should be obliged to go through the establishment exactly at the unequal rate the nine ladies might prescribe; that I should have to stop whenever they stopped, and, what was still worse, to hurry by whatever they happened at the moment to feel indisposed to notice.

As the disorder, however, was evidently incurable, I resolved to join in and get through the merry dance as well as I could. I therefore introduced myself to a partner, who, in return for the confidence I reposed in her, very obligingly teazed the young guide until he told her whatever I wanted; and by means of this description of spoon-diet, I obtained, I think, rather more nourishment than my share.

Our first introduction was to a room which none of the ladies would stop to look at, sur

rounded by mahogany presses, containing the punches, matrices, and ligatures (the largest collection in Europe), including those for Greek type, for a fount of which, in 1692, the University of Cambridge applied.

On entering the exceedingly well-lighted hall, No. I. of the Imprimerie Nationale (in the whole of which nearly a thousand people are employed), the first object that caught my eyes was a large tricolor flag, upon which was inscribed in gold letters,

"VIVE LA RÉPUBLIQUE!"

In different directions there appeared seven stoves, around four of which were standing, closely shaved, without coats or waistcoasts, and in very clean shirts-the sleeves of which being tucked up disclosed their bare arms--five men at each stove, engaged in what a novice of their art might have supposed to be some strange religious ceremony, for they kept stretching out. their right arms,-then closing both hands,—then jerking them four or five times over their heads, -pausing; and then, extending their right hands, they repeated the operation commonly called type-casting, which may be explained as follows. From the stove before him each man with a little ladle dips out a small quantity of

liquid metal, which pouring into a small matrix he jerks upwards, until, cooled by its rapid passage through the air, he is enabled to drop the type he has created on the table before him, and repeat the process.

From these stoves the fluid metal, in the mode described, is converted into the type of forty-eight different alphabets, speaking the languages of almost every nation on the globe. Indeed, while Pope Pius VII. was inspecting the establishment, the Lord's Prayer was not only printed in one hundred and fifty languages, but was bound up and presented to him.

As satellites to the seven furnaces, I observed several men employed in breaking off to its proper length, as fast as it was cast, the type, then handed over to four old women, each wearing on her thumb and forefinger a thick black leather case, with which she first made each rough-cast letter smooth, and then as our Universities treat "a fresh-man "-she polished it. These types, packed in parcels containing each only one letter, and which resemble octavo volumes, are then shut up in a dark closet adjoining, where they remain until summoned to perform their high literary duties.

On entering a room of 150 feet in length, my heart rejoiced within me at the welcome sight.