When amid the goblets' ringing, Whence the sacred strains arise, Mount with incense to the skies? (Jingle as before, you know,) Dost thou love while careless straying All the scattered flocks recalling Other sounds are all too low; This alone can reach Marco.' By the time Mr. Julian has finished his song, Which name for a painter would do very well; And fame quite a model of virtue himself. And goes to bed early, and does as he's bid. At this stage the reader my possibly wonder by what means he happens to come to Madrid, Which isn't exactly the place for a student — I mean one who studies, and does what is prudent. In every large town there are youngsters we know, Called students, like lucus a non lucendo. (If you blame the wrong accent, my muse will not halt her Course for your blame; I appeal to old Walter De Mapes; whensoever a good rhyme he wanted, he He, perchance, went for art (as some of us for literature), to seek models few places are fitter.' 'You may guess what is coming Jupiter Ammon, if it isn't too bad! The man has fallen asleep. I say, Bleecker, wake up! Is that the way you treat your friends? or did you think you were reading a back number of the North American? 'And is that the way you treat your friends, too. The fact is, Manhattan, I always said there was opium in those Jenny Linds. Very fine verses, those of yours, all the same give me an intense desire to hear the original.' 'It's your own loss; just as we were approaching the best part of it; Diogenes-Desgennais, the principal character of the piece Barrière's great creation, in fact.' "Oh, I saw enough of him in Les Parisiens. A magnificent declaimer against all sorts of vice; wondrous saucy to boot.' "Theophile Gautier says, that if any man were to talk in society as Desgennais does on the stage, he would be promptly kicked out of doors. All the better, then, that Diogenes should have some place where he can speak out without fear of such interruption.' 'But just consider a moment, Frank, if you are not rather behind the age in glorifying the Anglo-Saxons at the expense of the Gauls. Why, man, the Anglo-Saxons, half of them at least, have gone bodily over to the Gauls, horse, foot, and dragoons. The Alliance is the word now. Napoleon III. is the idol of the English pen and people; and since he is the state, and the nation too, here, they must admit all the institutions of the country with him admit them so far as not to condemn them. * His Latin version of Chevy Chace Has this sort of line in more than one place, The opposition of Anglo-Saxon and French ideas, sentiments, principles, morals, has already almost receded into the past, unless we have inherited all the family share of the difference.' 'Friend Bleecker, suppose you were in a house on fire, and had no decent pretext for cutting out of the premises, and letting it burn up by itself, it is probable that you would assist the next man to you in trying to check the conflagration, without waiting to make an elaborate scrutiny of his antecedents. He might be a pickpocket or a Sewer reporter, so long as he helped you to pass buckets and save furniture. France and England are now united in a common cause, by the imperative necessity of self-defence and self-preservation; but as to any fusion or approximation of the ways of thinking between them on social and moral subjects, until such period as the Ethiopian shall change his skin and the leopard his spots, don't you believe it. The present Emperor may be a greater man than all his uncles put together; he may be the greatest man on earth (our people certainly have never been disposed to deny his claims; you recollect it was a countryman of ours, the unlucky Wykoff, who first discovered him, so to speak, and prophesied that the Prisoner of Ham,' whom all Europe then considered a most absurd adventurer, would turn out a great man); that doesn't affect the question ultimately. Do you suppose this dynasty is to last for ever? Or that any one man, in the few years that constitute the span of an earthly potentate's reign, can reform and transform the entire character of a people which has taken hundreds of years, and has remained formed pretty much as it now is for hundreds of years? Or is John Bull to become Frenchified in his dotage? I haven't so bad an opinion of the old gentleman.' that 'But come, don't you think, candidly between us, that you have too bad an opinion of the French you are haunted by old prejudices against them - that it is just possible you may misunderstand them? Confess, even now, that you think a little better of them and their ways than when you knew them less.' If we are to reason conversely, judging from the way in which they misunderstand us, I may be far enough out in my reckoning; but with increased experience of the people, my opinion of them remains much the same - only rather more so as our western men say. Doubtless there are several leaves which we might take from their book with great advantage. I believe that the intellectual training of their young men has been much underrated by the English, and far from fully appreciated by the Americans. I admit that they are much more agreeable and amusing companions than we, on short acquaintance at least; and that their conversational powers are justly admired by ladies. We have a different theory in this matter; we believe that a man who talks a great deal will be apt to talk either a great deal of nonsense which is useless, or a great deal of personality - which is dangerous. But after all it is a question of comparison; probably the English consider us as over-talkative as we do the French. Let us own, too, that in temperance and frugality they are vastly superior to us (the fact is worth noticing, were it only to show that temperance, in its modern technical sense, is not the parent and source of all other virtues, but is perfectly compatible with numerous vices and basenesses). But, without dwelling on minor faults, there are two huge blots on the French character which must render it hateful to us, so long as virtue and honour have any real meaning of themselves, independent of time, place, and custom. One is, its inability to appreciate female virtue and domestic happiness two things, we may remark, which have gone hand in hand with constitutional liberty ever since the days when Tacitus wrote his Germania, and Catullus his Epithalamium of Manlius and Julia. We need not dwell upon this we need not stop to discuss the tu-quoque system of answering the charge the appeal to individual instances elsewhere, or to the statistical records of other countries. We both know that there is an awful amount of vice in London and in New York, as well as in Paris; and we know too the different conditions under which it exists; that in the former cities vice bears on its brow the stamp of social degradation, and hides itself in holes and corners; that here it stalks out in the broad sunlight, and disputes the ground with virtue, and rather elbows it out of place. Enough of that. The other feature of the Gallic character even more antipathetic to ours, is their small regard of truth. This is a propensity that grows up with them, inculcated by one generation on the succeeding. You remember probably, in Villelle, how the school-girls used to confess, as a perfect matter of course and a venial peccadillo, J'ai menti plusieurs fois. There is no woman who, at any period of her life, has had experience of a French school, either as pupil or teacher, but can testify to the truth of this picture. There is no man with similar experience but can endorse the statement as equally applicable to the other sex; and this, too, is a 'slave's vice.' Observe two men in blouses quarrelling. Count how many times they give each other the lie. Two Englishmen or Americans of the corresponding class would have pitched into each other before they had exchanged the epithet three times; but the Frenchman does not feel the insult in the same degree. Look at their ideal heroes. In this very last piece of young Dumas, Le Demi-Monde that all Paris goes to see, and all the critics are in ecstasies over one of the principal characters is held up as a striking example of an homme d'honneur always talking and bragging about it too; how does he show his honour at the conclusion? By telling an immense lie, and acting it out to the smallest details, his justification being, that he thereby takes in another liar diamond cut diamond there's a hero for you! Some people will tell you that this little failing is a necessary adjunct of French politeness, which is to be accepted as the set-off to it. Miserable error! True politeness may often require a man to hold his tongue it never requires him to utter a falsehood!' 'Bless me, Manhattan, what a Diogenes in patent leathers you are becoming! It's as good as a sermon to hear you, and very consolatory especially after reading Barnum's Autobiography, and a few numbers of The Sewer and The Jacobin.” 'An unfortunate and puzzling parenthesis that of yours! But I fancy we can give them a few such points and beat them yet; and it does me good to let off steam thus once in a while, if it be only to make a profession of faith, and to show that, though we may have dallied for a time in the enchanted cave, we have not eaten so much of the lotus but that we can arise when the need |