for once in his life, to depend solely on himself, docked of his lictors, for whatever amount of respect, or even attention, he can attract. This is a wholesome and healthy ordeal; very good for the moral as well as the biliary ducts. It sets a new and unexpected value upon whatever little sense or self-reliance one may really possess, and makes a man understand his manhood better in a month than he could have done in twenty years through the mirage of a false position.

turn of life when the green leaf is beginning to get yellow and sickly, and be assured there is nothing like a plunge into new worlds of human faces for the recov ery of youth, with all its giddy joys and airy fallacies.

But the difficulty is to get an Englishman to make this plunge in downright earnest. Instead of running wild amongst the people of the continent, and giving free vent to whatever youthful mirth has not been quite trampled out of him, he usually runs And no man abandons himself so utterly a muck at them. Instead of gambolling to the intoxication of this new and raptur- with them, he butts and horns them. He ous existence as an Englishman, if once he takes umbrage at every thing. It is imposallows himself to give way to it. He rush- sible to please him. He is resolved not to es at once to the opposite extreme. He be pleased, come what may. Shine or rain, chuckles and screams, like a boy out of it is all the same; he quarrels with every school, like a hound just released from the thing, simply because it is not English. It thong, bounding over fields and ditches, might be supposed he went on an expediand taking every thing at a leap, as if Beel- tion in search of England, he is so disconzebub were dancing mad at his heels. If tented at not finding England at every turn he is only sure that he is not observed, that of the road. It never occurs to him how nobody sees him-for this craven con- much enjoyment and instruction he loses sciousness, and fear of ridicule, haunt him by not trying to discover the points of mu day and night-there is nothing too puerile, tual agreement: his whole labor is to dig nothing too gay or riotous for him. He is out the points of difference. He has not no longer forty or fifty, but rampant nine- the least glimmer of a conception how teen. The sudden enchantment sets him much the former overbalance the latter; beside himself; he is under the influence how much more there is to admire and imof a spell; no longer starched and tram- itate, than to censure and avoid; and how melled in frigid responsibilities, his joints much sound feeling and morality, practical begin to move with freedom and elasticity; virtue, and social goodness, there may be he is all eyes, legs, ears. With what curi- in common between people who scowl at osity he peers into shop-windows and ba- each other like frowning cliffs apart' upzaars; with what vivacity, wondering se- on questions of cookery and ventilation. cretly all the while at his miraculous acces- He delights in picking up vexations and sion of gusto, he criticises picture-galleries cross-purposes, and incidents that hint and museums; how vigorously he hunts dislike;' and he snarls at them as a dog through royal parks and palaces to collect does at a bone, which, all unprofitable as it gossip for the table d'hôte; how he climbs is, he takes a sort of surly pleasure in lofty steeples and boasts of his lungs; what growling over. Every step he makes furmountains of ice he devours in the heat of nishes fresh excuses for grumbling and the day; what torrents of lemonade gazeuse getting out of humor; and the only wonor Seltzer water he swallows; what a din-der is why he ever left home, and why be ner he makes amidst a bewildering chaos does not go back again without delay. of provocations; and how zealously he nourishes his emancipated enthusiasm with hock and claret, in the exquisite agony of a profound contempt for gout and indiges

tion.

Verily there is nothing under heaven so thoroughly English, as those things which are in the very grain of their nature the most thoroughly un-English: so unnatural is the slavery of our habitual self-suppression, so natural our disfranchisement: and of these extremes are we pieced. O ye who fold yourselves up in the coil of sour melancholy, 'like the fat weed that rots on Lethe's stream,' take heed at that critical

There is nothing to eat (this is universal); the wines are vinegar; the lower classes wallow in dirt and superstition; the churches are hung all over with theatrical gewgaws; the people are eaten up by the priests; the stench of the towns is past endurance; the women are pert and affected, the men all folly and grimace; the few educated people are destitute of the dignity and reserve essential to the maintenance of rank and order; there is no distinction of persons; and one cannot go into a public company without having one's Teutonic delicacy offended by the levity and grossness of the conversation. It has been well

said of the English, that their forte is the disagreeable and repulsive.

hereditary dread of scattering and weakening them. He has been brought up in the Is there nothing in England to provoke notion that a Jack of all trades is master of the acerbity of a foreigner, who should take none, and so he sticks to his last, and is pleasure in cataloguing annoyances and obstinately ignorant of every thing else. tantalizing himself with painful truths? This description of training makes capital Are we quite sure that we are exempt from mechanics; but you must not look for any public nuisances and social evils? Take a power of combination, any reasoning faculstranger into our manufacturing districts, ty, any capacity of comparison or generaliour mines and collieries, our great towns. zation, where the mind has been flattened Is there nothing there to move his compas- down and beaten into a single track. It is sion, to fill him with amazement and hor- this which, in a great degree, communiror? No wrong-doing, no oppression, no cates that air of gloom and reserve to the vice? On every side he is smitten to the English peasantry which strikes foreigners. heart by the cruelties of our system; by so forcibly on their first coming amongst the hideous contrast of wealth and want, us. Nor is the matter much mended in the plethora and famine; a special class smoth-higher circles of society. An English conered up in luxuries, and a dense population verzatione is like the 'Dead March' in struggling wolfishly for the bare means of 'Saul.' Every body seems to have got insubsistence. Out of all this, drunkenness to a sort of funereal atmosphere; the deepunknown in his own midsummer clime- est solemnity sits in every face; and the glares upon him at every step. He hears whole affair looks as if it were got up for the cry of despair, the bitter imprecation, any imaginable purpose but that of social the blasphemous oath, as he passes through the packed and steaming streets. True, we have fine shops and aristocratic houses, and macadamized roads, and paved causeways and footpaths; but these things, and the tone of comfort they inspire, and the ease and prosperity they imply, only make the real misery, the corroding depravity, all the more palpable and harrowing. As to priests-what becomes of our Church in the comparison? To be sure our priests never walk about the streets-they ride in their carriages: a symptom which is only an aggravation of the disease. Nor are we so free from superstition as we would have the world believe. It is not very long since Sir William Courtenay preached in East Kent; the followers of Johanna Southcote form a very thriving little sect; and witches are still accredited in the north. For credulity we might be matched against any contemporary country-witness our police reports, our joint-stock bubbles, our emigration schemes, and our patent medicines. Are we more enlightened as a nation than our neighbors? Do we treat men of letters with more regard? Is our population better instructed? Do you find anywhere in England, as you do in France and Germany, the poor way-side man acquainted with his local traditions, and proud of his great names in literature and history? All this sort of refinement is wanted: our population is bred up in material necessities, and has neither leisure nor inclination for intellectual culture. The workman knows nothing beyond his work, and even locks up his faculties in it, from an instinctive and VOL. III. No. IV. 31

intercourse and enjoyment. No wonder a stranger, accustomed to incessant variety, and bringing, by the force of habit, his entire stock of spirits to bear upon the occasion, should be chilled and petrified at a scene which presents such a perplexity to his imagination. He may put up, as gracefully as he can, with being cheated and overcharged and turned into ridicule for his blunders at hotels and lodging houses; these are vulgar and sordid vices. But he looks for compensation and sympathy to the upper classes. Is he disappointed? He is too much a man of the world, too intent upon making the best of every thing, too enjoué, and too ready to appreciate and ac knowledge whatever is really praiseworthy and agreeable, to annoy any body with his impressions. The contrast is marked-the inference irresistible.

We are so apt to think every thing wrong which does not happen to square with our own usages, that we rarely make allowances for the difference of habits and modes of life. But it ought to be remem. bered that some national traits may jar with our customs, and yet harmonize perfectly with the general characteristics and necessities of others; and that many of the very traits we desiderate in them would be totally irreconcilable with the whole plan of their society-perhaps even with their climate, which frequently exercises an influence that cannot be averted over society itself. One of the things, for example, which most frets and chafes an Englishman of the common stamp is the eternal flutter of the continent. He cannot make

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 négociant; 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 an 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 any where, 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 being 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 calculated 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 facades-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 We not only forget all such items enable them to live well in France. This is on the one hand, but the historical and the magnet which attracts so many people local circumstances on the other, which on narrow incomes to the French shores. might help to reconcile us to the unfavor- At the little town of Dinan, on the Rance, able side of the comparison. Continental there are nearly 300 English residents; at towns are generally of great antiquity, hav-Tours, on the Loire, there are 2000, and ing a remote origin in forts and castles, there were formerly three times that numand becoming gradually enlarged to meet ber, until certain unpleasantnesses broke up new necessities. They are, consequently, and dispersed the community; Avranches,

ence.

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.

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 he was able to keep at home, or rather, places in proportion. People do not exile whether he was able to keep any society at themselves for mere caprice to a strange all? If so, why did he condemn himself to land, where a strange language is spoken, this miserable banishment? Why, he knew where they are surrounded by strange cus- very well, that the mere cost of putting himtoms, and separated from familiar faces and self en regle to make and receive visits, old ties and associations; they must have supposing it possible to keep aloof from a strong motive for making so many pain- the consequent expenses of seeing compaful sacrifices of habit, of friendship within ny, would have swallowed up his whole incall if not within reach of easy intercourse; come. and that motive must be more powerful than the claims and considerations it overrules. At home they are exposed to a thousand distresses; they cannot sustain the position to which their connexions or their tastes invite them; and then there are children to be cared for, to be educated, and put out in the world. How is all this to be accomplished upon means so limited as to keep them in a state of hopeless warfare with appearances? The alternative is to settle in a country where the necessaries of life are cheap, where education is cheap, where they can escape the eyes of Argus, and do as they like: a sort of genteel emigration. Who is the wiser whether they do this on £100 or £1000 a year, if they can do it independently? They are out of the realms of spite and tattle. Let nobody wonder then at the numbers of English who settle in France and other cheap countries; the real wonder is that there are not more of them. But let nobody, either out of false delicacy or falser pride, mistake the causes of their settling there. It is not from choice but necessity. The question comes home quite as forcibly to the English gentleman of £300 per annum, who rents a house at Avranches or Granville, as to the practical farmer who, before he is ground into a pauper by high rents at home, turns his little property into capital, and transports himself and his family 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.

But the assertion is not true that such places are destitute of good society; and in not a few instances the best society is too intellectual for the common run of economists, consisting as it does of the families of men of science and letters connected with the public institutions of the locality. In this respect France is essentially different from England, and it is desirable to note the dif ference carefully. While the system of centralization renders Paris the culminating point of the political movements of the country, and consequently draws into its focus much of the wealth, and all the fashions of the kingdom; literature and science, diffusive in their results, but retired and silent in their operations, linger lovingly in sequestered retreats, in provincial towns and villages. Almost every town has its college, or at all events its museum, and its public schools, and upon these foundations several professors are established. These are frequently men of a very high order of talent-antiquaries, good scholars, and ardent lovers of literature. It is scarcely necessary to observe that excellent society might be formed out of such materials; but this is unfortunately not always the sort of society the English resident cares to culti vate. The want, however, lies in him, not in the elements around him. The French provinces are, in fact, full of a class of readers and writers unknown in England. 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 distinguishThe English resident in France is not sat- ed men of letters in France run up to Paris, isfied, however, with his new mode of life as in England they run up to London. Men after all, and must let off a little ill-humor of fortune do, leaving their chateaux to go upon the people. He exclaims, "Oh! yes, to ruin, while they riot in the salons of you get necessaries cheap enough; but there the metropolis; fashionable novelists, drathe advantage ends. There is no such matists and dreamers in blankverse and phithing as society in such places, and you losophy, fly to Paris as the only place where must make up your mind to a mere state they can obtain encouragement and remuof vegetation. The best you can make of it neration; but historians and antiquaries, a is banishment with plenty to eat and drink." | very large class, are content with the hum