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.'

'But come, don't you think, candidly between us, that you have too bad an opinion of the French - that 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 Villette, 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 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!'

one of

'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

comes, and shake off the dust of our feet against this paradise of vanities, and go forth out of it into a world of earnest and serious men.'

'Amid a great confusion of metaphor and illustration. After that we must go and dine at the Café Voisin.'

APROPOS OF "RACHEL AND THE NEW WORLD."

"Spirit of the Times", July 1856.

WE like contrast. It is the main principle and theory of our contributions to the "Spirit." In accordance with this principle we sit down on the fourth of July to give whomever it may concern the butt end of our mind touching M. Leon Beauvallet and his book. The greatest of days, and the meanest of men. There is a good contrast to begin with.

Our country has been blessed with a great variety of travellers and tourists, of all sorts and nations, and difference of fitness for their self-imposed task of deciding and discussing our manners and institutions. Beauvallet in one or two points was qualified for the task beyond all his predecessors.

In the first place, he understood just one word, and no more, of our language. This gives peculiar value to his explanations, as, for instance, when he informs his countrymen that cammillia is the English for camelia.

Secondly, he had made up his mind, before coming to America, that everything in it must be perfectly detestable.

But if so, naturally exclaims the reader, why did he come here at all? Ah, why indeed? Quis expedivit psittaco suum chaire? quoth Persius (we give timely warning that, having been bitten by Jules Janin, we intend in this article to discharge a vast superfluity of quotation upon society.) The one word of English which Beauvallet understood was dollar. America to him, like England to Dr. Wagner, was "only to be valued for her money." Probably he was not the only one in the Felix

company (they turned out anything but a happy family in the end) who entertained the same opinion.

But Beauvallet had other qualifications. America must present to any Frenchman, seeing it for the first time, a strange contrast to his customary associations. The best educated Parisian, the most worldly-wise gentleman of the Faubourg St. Germain, must find many things to surprise, mystify, and annoy him. A country which you enter without passports, and inhabit without fogs; men who assemble in huge crowds daily, and keep order without the presence of soldiers, and almost without the presence of policemen; politicians who can support the government without being paid for it, and abuse it without being imprisoned or exiled; editors who publish without caution-money or censors; a whole society which, being perfectly free to spend its Sunday as it chooses, goes to church, instead of to a theatre or to a horserace; a population which finds baths a necessity, and an opera a superfluity; bad coffee and good cigars; spirited horses driven without half a yard of curb-bit, and gentlemen who drive them without a rear guard of two flunkies, married women who love their husbands, and who do not love indecent conversation; young girls who are not shut up in convents, but allowed to go about freely in good society just as if every man in good society was not an unprincipled and dangerous character where women are concerned; all these things, and a thousand more, so shock his old ideas that he may well be pardoned for feeling uncomfortable.

Beauvallet was not an educated Frenchman (every educated Frenchman, now-a-days, knows a little English

unless, indeed, he happen to be a literary man,) still less a French gentleman. He was a third or fourth-rate actor, who had never attained celebrity, or filled an important role on the boards of any Parisian theatre. He had hung on the skirts of people really great in his calling; he knew some low literary men, like Roger de Beavoir (a person chiefly notorious for his perpetual squabbles and lawsuits with his wife); he had frequented second-class restaurants such as Vachette's and Bonvalet's, places much patronised by rapins out on a holiday, and the inferior grade of Lorettes, and which he apostrophizes as a real epicure might Philippe's or the Voisin. In short,