ting none. There is this remarkable point of contrast, too, that the former becomes at once a citizen of the country he visits, and the latter never ceases to be the petty lord of the manor, the common council man, the great gun of the village or the county. The universe is only Big Little Pedlington to Hopkins.

of Old England; and another to maintain When a Frenchman, or an Italian, comes intimate relations and constant interchange to England, he brings his sunshine with with nations as civilized as ourselves, to him. When an Englishman goes to France rub off the rust of isolation and drudgery, or Italy, he cannot leave his fogs behind to lift ourselves out of the one idea of him. He is like a rolling mass of darkness, money-getting, and to draw in humanity absorbing all the encircling light, but emitand good humor from our neighbors. In the large and philosophical sense of the word, we have never acted upon the true principle of colonization; we never conciliate the races we subdue-we conquer every thing but their affections. Our settlements are camps in a hostile country, as completely apart from the native population as swans' nests in a stream. In India, we are hedged in on all sides by jealousy and distrust; the war of races in Canada is as bitter at this moment as it was in 1760; and the animosities of the pale still flourish as rankly as ever in Ireland, in spite of free trade, two rebellions, the Union, Catholic Emancipation, and Reform. This comes of our immobility-of our elemental resistance to fusion.

The same thing that happens upon a great scale in political affairs, is illustrated in a minor way in the intercourse of travelling. Our social tariff amounts almost to a prohibition. Exchange of ideas takes place only at the extreme point of necessity. We are as reluctant to open our mouths or our ears as our ports, and have as profound a horror of foreign vivacity and communicativeness as of foreign corn. Habit goes a long way with us. People are so used to cry out 'The farmers are ruined,' that they must keep up war prices after a peace of nearly thirty years. We have a similar difficulty in relaxing our manners. The bulk of our continental travellers enter an hotel with as much severity and suspicion in their looks as if we were fighting the battles of legitimacy over again, and were doomed to fight them for ever.

But it is surprising how a little knocking about in steamboats, and railways, and diligences, and schnell-posts and voitures of all sorts, and hotels with every variety of perfumes, shakes a man out of his sluggish thoughts and opake humors. It is the best of all constitutional remedies for mind and body, although it acts but slowly on the whipcord nerves of the English. It is good for the brains and the stomach. It invigo rates the imagination, loosens the blood and makes it leap through the veins, dispels the nebulous mass of the stay-at-home animal, and, liberating the spirit from its drowsy weight of prejudices, sends it rebounding back, lighter and brighter than ever, with the fresh morning beams throbbing in its pulses. There is nothing in this levelling world of ours which so effectually annihilates conventional respectability as travelling. It tumbles down with a single blow the whole wire and gauze puppet, reducing its empty length and breadth to mere finery and sawdust. All our staid, solemn proprieties, that beset and check us at every land's turn like inauguration mysteries, as if we were entering upon some esoteric novitiate every day of our lives-all our family pride and class instincts-our local importance and stately caution-paddocks and lawnsBy staying so much at home, and being liveries, revenues, and ceremonials-all go kept so much at home by the pressure of for nothing in the swirl and roar of the livexternal circumstances, our ideas and feeling tide. A great landed gentleman cannot ings become introverted. We turn eter- bring his ten-feet walls, his deer-park, or nally upon ourselves. We accumulate im- his parish-church, with its time-honored mensely, but undergo little or no sensible slabs and monuments, in the palm of his modifications of character. We advance hand to the continent; he cannot stick the in the direction of utility, but are still pret-vicar and the overseer and the bench of ty much the same people we were a couple justices in his hatband; he cannot inscribe of hundred years ago. The only marked the terrors of the tread-mill on his traveldifference is that we are less hearty, less ling-bag; he cannot impress every body frank and joyous. We drop our old cus- abroad as he can at home with the awful toms, our games and festivals, one by one, majesty of his gate-house, and the lump of and grow more and more plodding and self-plush that slumbers in the padded armish. 'Merry England' survives only in ballads. Robin Hood and Little John are gone to the workhouse.

chair; he has passed out of the artificial medium by which he has hitherto been so egregiously magnified, and he is forced,

out how the people contrive to carry on the business of life, since they appear to be always engrossed in its pleasures. He is not content to 'take the goods the Gods provide,' but must needs know whether they are honestly come by. To him, the people seem to be perpetually flying from place to place, on the wing for fresh delights. It never occurs to him that he is making holiday himself; he only thinks it extraordinary that they should be doing the same thing. Yet a moment's reflection ought to show him that they must labor for their pleasure as we do; although they do not take their pleasure, as we do, with an air of labor. Pleasure is cheaper on the continent, as every thing else is, where people are not bowed down by an Old Man at their backs in the shape of a glorious National Debt.

few moments every chair is occupied. Cheap refuge against ennui, against the evil misgivings of solitude, the wear and tear of conventional hindrances to the free course of the animal spirits! Here are to be found every class, from the lord to the negociant; noblemen and commoners of the highest rank and their families; military, and civilians of all professions; and some of the resident élite of the locality, who occasionally prefer this mode of living to the dreary details and lonely pomp of a small household. From this usage, which we deprecate so much because it impinges upon our dignity and sullenness, a manifest advantage is gained in the practical education of men for any intercourse with general society to which they may be called. Nor is it of less value in conferring upon them that ease and self-possession and versatile command of topics, for which the people of the continent are so much more distinguished than our countrymen.

This lightness of the heart, joined to the lightness of the asmosphere, produces that open-air festivity and community of enjoyment which makes the heavy hypochondri- An implicit and somewhat audacious reacal man stare. He is used to think of tax-liance upon the virtues of money in carryes and easterly winds, and cannot under- ing a traveller through every difficulty, is stand how such crowds of people can go one of the foibles by which we are preout of doors to enjoy themselves. He eminently noted all over the world. Nor wonders they are so improvident of money are we content merely to depend upon the and rheumatism. Little does he suspect weight of our purses, but we must brandish how slight their acquaintance is with either, them ostentatiously in the faces of innkeepand how much satisfaction they have in ers and postilions, till we make them contheir cap and bells and their blue skies not-scious of our superiority, with the insultwithstanding! He goes to an hotel, and ing suggestion in addition, that we think petulantly orders dinner in a private room, them poor and venal enough to be ready to his sense of exclusiveness taking umbrage do any thing for hire. Of course we must at the indiscriminate crush of the salle à pay for our vanity and insolence; and acmanger below. Here again he is at fault. cordingly resentment in kind takes swingThe salle à manger is the absolute fashion ing toll out of us wherever we go. Milor of the place. It is the universal custom of Anglais is the sure mark for pillage and Europe. The Englishman alone cannot re- overcharge and mendacious servility; all concile himself to it. He sees a salon set of which he may thank himself for having out on a scale of such magnificence, that called into existence. We remember fallhe immediately begins to calculate the ex-ing in with a.. old gentleman at Liege sevpenditure, and jumps to a conclusion-al-eral years ago who had travelled all over ways estimating things by his own standard -that the speculation must be a dead loss. To be sure, that is no business of his, but he cannot help the instinct. Enter a salon of this description, and observe with what regal splendor it is appointed; brilliantly lighted up, painted, gilt, draperied with oriental pomp; a long table runs down the centre, perhaps two or three, laid out for dinner with excellent taste. You wonder by what magic the numerous company is to be brought together for which such an extensive accommodation is provided; presently a bell rings; it is followed, after an interval, by a second and a third peal; then the guests glide in noiselessly, and in a

Belgium and up the Rhine into Nassau, without knowing one word of any language except his own native English. His explanation of this curious dumb process to a group of his countrymen tickled the whole party amazingly. He thought you could travel anywhere, without knowing any language, if you had only plenty of money: he did not know what he had paid at Weisbaden, or anywhere else: his plan was to thrust his hand into his pocket, take it out again filled with sovereigns, and let them. help themselves: he never could make out their bills, they were written in such a hieroglyphical hand: what of that? Rhino will carry you anywhere! (an exclamation

enforced by a thundering slap on his
breeches pocket ;) he didn't care about be-
ing cheated; he had money enough, and
more where that came from; he supposed
they cheated him, but he could afford it;
that was all he looked to; and much more
to the same purpose.
We would ask any
reasonable man of any country whether an
avowed system of this kind, which puts an
open premium upon knavery, is not calcu-
lated to draw upon those who practise it a
just measure of obloquy and derision.

built without much method, piled up of all orders and ages: narrow streets, paved all over with sharp stones-fantastic and irregular façades-all sorts of roofs and angles-every color in the rainbow-dark entries-latticed windows-gullies of water running through the streets like rivulets-and crowds of men, women, children, and horses tramping up and down all day long, as if they were holding a fair. A comparison of one of these towns with an English town is as much out of the nature of things, as a comparison between the old Egyptian religion, all grandeur and filth, with a well-swept conventicle.

The determination not to see things as they are, but to condemn them wholesale for not being something else, is another of our salient characteristics. And this de- The English who settle on the continent termination generally shows itself most people who emigrate for good reasons of violently in reference to things which, for their own, but chiefly for one which they the most part, can neither be remedied nor are not always willing to avow-are hardly altered. The physiognomy of the country less inaccessible to reason and generosity. upsets all our previous theories of compact You always find them grumbling and as living and picturesque scenery: tall, crazy murky as thunder-clouds. They never give châteaux-dreary rows of trees-intermin- way to pleasant influences: they are sensiable roads dull stretches of beet-root and tive only to hard knocks. The crust of mangel-wurzel-no hedge-rows-no busy prejudice never melts: it can only be chiphum of machinery-and such towns! The ped off by repeated blows. And the worst towns are the especial aversion of an Eng- of it is that the location they are driven to lishman. He compiles in his own mind a select, for its superior convenience on the flattering ideal from the best general fea- score of neighborhood and economy, pitchtures of an English town, and immediately es them amongst a people the very reverse sets about a comparison with the straggling of themselves. The sullen pride of the discordant mass of houses before him. The English and the explosive vanity of the result is false both ways, making the Eng- French make a compound fit for a witch lish town better than it is, and the conti- caldron. They are felicitously illustrated nental town a thousand times worse. This procedure is obviously fallacious, to say nothing about the prejudice that lurks at the bottom. We carry away with us only a few vague pictorial images, rejecting all the disagreeable details: English neatness, English order, whitewash, green verandahs, windows buried in roses and honey-suckles, gardens boxed round with faultless precision and a serene air of contentment over the whole, as if it were a nook in Paradise. We drop out all the harsh features: the crushed spirit of the inmates of these English residents in France are drawn pretty houses, who find it so hard to live in thither by the grand motive of cheap living, their aromatic cottages; the haggard, cheap education for their children. A famspeechless things that hang round the door-ily could not exist in England, without unways and road-sides; the brusque manners; dergoing severe privations and severer the masked misery; the heartless indiffer- humiliation, upon the small sum which will ence. We not only forget all such items on the one hand, but the historical and local circumstances on the other, which might help to reconcile us to the unfavorable side of the comparison. Continental towns are generally of great antiquity, having a remote origin in forts and castles, and becoming gradually enlarged to meet new necessities. They are, consequently,

by a story too good to be true. A Frenchman is boasting to an Englishman of the battle of Waterloo, a sore subject on both sides, and arrogantly claiming the victory. "How can that be," exclaims the Englishman, "since you left us in possession of the field?" "Mon Dieu !" replies the Frenchman, "we won the battle, but you were so obstinate you wouldn't be beaten, and we left the field in disgust!" Frenchmen have the best of such disputes by turning even their failures into pleasantries.

enable them to live well in France. This is the magnet which attracts so many people on narrow incomes to the French shores. At the little town of Dinan, on the Rance, there are nearly 300 English residents; at Tours, on the Loire, there are 2000, and there were formerly three times that number, until certain unpleasantnesses broke up and dispersed the community; Avranches,

he was able to keep at home, or rather, whether he was able to keep any society at all? If so, why did he condemn himself to this miserable banishment? Why, he knew very well, that the mere cost of putting himself en regle to make and receive visits, supposing it possible to keep aloof from the consequent expenses of seeing company, would have swallowed up his whole income.

St. Malo, St. Servan, swarm with English; | We should like to ask this desolate, but there are 6000 at Boulogne; and they con- well-fed gentleman, what sort of society gregate at Rouen, Caen, Havre, and other places in proportion. People do not exile themselves for mere caprice to a strange land, where a strange language is spoken, where they are surrounded by strange customs, and separated from familiar faces and old ties and associations; they must have a strong motive for making so many painful sacrifices of habit, of friendship within call if not within reach of easy intercourse; and that motive must be more powerful But the assertion is not true that such than the claims and considerations it over-places are destitute of good society; and in rules. At home they are exposed to a not a few instances the best society is too thousand distresses; they cannot sustain intellectual for the common run of econothe position to which their connexions or mists, consisting as it does of the families their tastes invite them; and then there of men of science and letters connected with are children to be cared for, to be educated, the public institutions of the locality. In this and put out in the world. How is all this respect France is essentially different from to be accomplished upon means so limited England, and it is desirable to note the dif as to keep them in a state of hopeless war- ference carefully. While the system of cenfare with appearances? The alternative is tralization renders Paris the culminating to settle in a country where the necessaries point of the political movements of the of life are cheap, where education is cheap, country, and consequently draws into its where they can escape the eyes of Argus, focus much of the wealth, and all the fashand do as they like: a sort of genteel ions of the kingdom; literature and science, emigration. Who is the wiser whether diffusive in their results, but retired and they do this on £100 or £1000 a year, if silent in their operations, linger lovingly they can do it independently? They are in sequestered retreats, in provincial towns out of the realms of spite and tattle. Let and villages. Almost every town has its colnobody wonder then at the numbers of lege, or at all events its museum, and its English who settle in France and other public schools, and upon these foundations cheap countries; the real wonder is that several professors are established. These there are not more of them. But let no- are frequently men of a very high order of body, either out of false delicacy or falser talent-antiquaries, good scholars, and arpride, mistake the causes of their settling dent lovers of literature. It is scarcely there. It is not from choice but necessity. necessary to observe that excellent society The question comes home quite as forcibly might be formed out of such materials; but to the English gentleman of £300 per an- this is unfortunately not always the sort of num, who rents a house at Avranches or society the English resident cares to culti Granville, as to the practical farmer who, vate. The want, however, lies in him, not before he is ground into a pauper by high in the elements around him. The French rents at home, turns his little property into provinces are, in fact, full of a class of readcapital, and transports himself and his fam-ers and writers unknown in England. ily to Van Diemen's Land. The only important difference between the two cases is, that the one can return when he pleases, and the other, having embarked his whole substance in a single venture, must abide the issue.

The English resident in France is not satisfied, however, with his new mode of life after all, and must let off a little ill-humor upon the people. He exclaims, "Oh! yes, you get necessaries cheap enough; but there the advantage ends. There is no such thing as society in such places, and you must make up your mind to a mere state of vegetation. The best you can make of it is banishment with plenty to eat and drink."

Every department has its own capital, towards which all its lines of interest converge, forming a minor system of centralization in every thing that concerns its local history, arts, science, and antiquities. It must not be supposed that all distinguished men of letters in France run up to Paris, as in England they run up to London. Men of fortune do, leaving their chateaux to go to ruin, while they riot in the salons of the metropolis; fashionable novelists, dramatists and dreamers in blankverse and philosophy, fly to Paris as the only place where they can obtain encouragement and remuneration; but historians and antiquaries, a very large class, are content with the hum

bler reward of discharging a useful duty to their country in the most useful way, by staying behind to dignify with their presence the scene of their birth and their labors. Thus, while Victor Hugo, Scribe, and Sue, must of necessity engross all eyes in Paris, such men as Bodin and Mahé are content to publish the fruits of their learned researches in the midst of the regions to which they refer. Indeed, so completely is this principle acted upon, that if you want to procure a particular history or an account of the antiquities of any particular place, your best chance is to inquire for it in the place itself. It frequently happens that such works never find their way into Paris through the ordinary channels of trade.

form a social union with their guests; but the constitutional frigidity of the English forbids the bans. In this respect the English, when they shape themselves into a community, keep up all their old notions to the letter, even towards each other. There seems to be no exception to this rule; they are the same in all places. There is not a solitary instance of an English settlement in which, as far as possible, the entire habits, root and branch, of the mother country have not been transplanted bodily, without the slightest reference to the interests or prejudices of the surrounding population. The English are the only people in the world who do this-the only people who could do it. The Germans, who The gradual effect of an English settle- resemble the English more than any other ment in a French town is to spoil it. In nation in every thing else, differ from them course of time, it becomes a French town widely in this. Wherever they go, they anglicized, neither French nor English, but adapt themselves to the country, and are a bad mixture of both, like a bifteck Anglais uniformly distinguished by the simplicity with a heavy sweat of garlic in it. The and economy of their style, their noiselessEnglish mode of settling is something in ness and bonhommie. In America they are its nature utterly averse to the whole the- beloved for these qualities, and for keeping ory of French life. The English are for clear of wounding the self-respect and nasettling in the most literal sense-for col- tional pride of the people. The English lecting round them all the conveniences glory in running counter to the prejudices and fixtures and comforts of home-for sit- of the world, and throwing out the angular ting down with a strict view to the future-points of their character with the irritability for shutting out the weather and the eyes of the hedgehog. of their neighbors-for keeping themselves In the midst of all this purse-proud dissnug and reserved and select, (select above play, there is a real meanness, a small huckall things!)-for quiet dinners and tea in stering spirit that constantly betrays itself. the evening for in-door as diametrically In these very cheap places they are always opposed to out-of-door enjoyments, carpets, complaining of the great expense of living, blinds, screens, and pokers-and for nursing and the frauds that are practised on them. themselves up in habits contradictory to It is a common accusation to bring against the spirit of the people, the climate, the tra- the French, that they have two chargesdi tions, the usages of the country. The an English charge and a French charge; but French are exactly the antipodes of all this. the evil must be set down, along with other They hate staying in one spot-they are petty antagonisms, to the responsibility of all flutter, open doors, open windows, and those who make the market. When the open mouths they cannot keep in the English shall have learned to live like the house-they abhor quiet dinners-and fix- French, they may hope to be let in under the tures, conveniences, cupboards, and com- French tariff. It is not surprising, all circumforts, are so many agonies in detail to them.stances considered, that the French should They are in a perpetual whirl, sleep about five hours out of the four and twenty, and shoot out of bed, like quicksilver, the moment they awaken, ready for the same round again. Repose is essential to an Englishman it is physically and mentally impossible to a Frenchman. The latter makes the most of the present moment: the former is always laying up for his children. In fact, the Frenchman lives for to-day-the Englishman for posterity.

The French, to do them justice, would be willing enough, from an habitual preference for the lesser horn of a dilemma, to

regard our Cheapside countrymen with a little distrust and no very great good will. One cogent reason for it is, that they know, sure as the swallow brings summer, the English bring high prices. Wherever they cluster together, they raise the markets; partly by increased demand, and partly by that mammon swagger, which is one of the vices of the national character. Formerly an inhabitant of a small town in a cheap district, might live comfortably on 1200 francs per annum and keep his servant; but the English no sooner set up a hive there, than he is obliged to dispense with his do