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Paris

Sept 17th.

This is the twentieth letter I have begun to you, my dear Dot. Heaven knows if it will have a better fate than any of its predecessors, as I am generally called away a dozen times whilst I am writing a page, & my composition always appears so bad on a second perusal that I uniformly destroy them, so that you have no chance of receiving an epistle from me, unless I can get through it at my first attempt, & then with all its imperfections on its head, I send it forth trusting to your good nature not its own merits, to tolerate such a production. We have now been 18 days in Paris & have seen a great many of the extraordinary sights, this famed city contains, the public buildings are magnificent, but the town itself is very inferior to London, they surpass us in splendour and luxury & we are far beyond them in cleanliness & comfort. Various are the odours that are exhaled from the streets by the passenger, one large gutter, a receptacle for every sort of filth, rolls a black fetid stream down the middle of every street in Paris, & the drains, instead of being as in London, under the pavement, are on its surface, the very air is impregnated with dirt, yet it is not an unhealthy place, which appears to me to be a very unaccountable circumstance, There is no society here. Lady Castlereagh is at home every evening, the Duke of Wellington gives Dinners