With the World's Great Travellers — Createspace

Paris, pleasure capital of the world, the ideal cosmopolitan city, a thousand different delights for a thousand different tastes, is as fascinating to the scholar and bookworm as to the tourist and the belle of fashion. The weary old world would die of melancholy if the light of gay Paris were to go out. Lutetia, as the Romans called the ancient town, is still the merry child in the family of nations. Fortune gave it favors without stint. Emperors and kings delighted to adorn it with a lavishness equalled by the lasting splendor of their gifts. Art and learning, the genius of ecclesiasticism and the desire for popular enjoyment, contributed the venerable edifices and their priceless treasures, and dowered the modern city with the heirlooms of many centuries. Notre Dame rose eight hundred years ago from the ruins of a fourth-century church. A few years ago were discovered the foundations of an amphitheatre capable of seating ten thousand people as far back as the year 350, when the city's population must have been at least twice that number. No wonder all the world gathers periodically at this natural centre of everything that can make a city a miniature world in itself, for in the Paris of to-day stand side by side monuments and memorials of antiquity, and the grandest triumphs of latter-day genius in a profusion that bewilders the eye and the mind. It is as though the genii of all time and all peoples had conspired to shower their fairest gifts upon the favored spot of earth round which the drama of the ages has enacted its tremendous tableaux.