an eminent for wit and genius,
must be intended for a Frenchman. Of this nature is the affirmation that
Triaquero is meant for Voltaire; and the still more intrepid
declaration, that Lope de Vega and Calderon de la Barca are cited, not
as Spanish authors, but as types by which Corneille and Racine are
shadowed out. It is true that the passage is exactly applicable to
Calderon and Lope de Vega; and for that reason, as they are great comic
writers, can hardly apply equally well to Corneille and Racine. But such
trifling difficulties are as dust when placed in the balance with the
inveterate opinion to which we have already alluded.

According to the principles adopted by M. Neufchateau, _Gil Blas_ might
be adapted to any court, or age, or country. For instance, if Triaquero,
meaning a charlatan, (which, by the way, it does not,) refers of
necessity to Voltaire, might not any Englishman, if the work had been
published recently, insist that the work must have been written by an
Englishman, as the allusion could apply to no one so well as him, who,
having been a judge without law, and a translator of Demosthenes without
Greek, had, to his other titles to public esteem, added that of being an
historian without research?

The difference between Dr Sangrado and our hydropathists is merely that
between hot and cold water, by no means excluding an allusion to the
latter, under the veil, as M. Neufchateau has it, of Spanish manners.
Would it be quite impossible to find in St James's Street, or in certain
buildings at no great distance from the Thames, the exact counterparts
of Don Matthias de Silva and his companions? Gongora, indeed, in spite
of his detestable taste, was a man of genius; and therefore to find his
type among us would be difficult, if not impossible, unless an excess of
the former quality, for which he was conspicuous, might counterbalance a
deficiency in the latter. Are our _employes_ less pompous and empty than
Gil Blas and his companions? our squires less absurd and ignorant than
the hidalgoes of Valencia? Let any one read some of the pamphlets on
Archbishop Whately's Logic, or attend an examination in the schools at
Oxford, and then say if the race of those who plume themselves on the
discovery, that Greek children cried when they were whipped is extinct?
To be sure, as the purseproud insolence of a _nouveau riche_, and indeed
of _parvenus_ generally, is quite unknown among us, nobody could rely on
those point