ployed in drinking. I shall not repeat the
contemptible affair, but it furnished the subject of a caricature.

The English officers in general behave in a handsome and liberal manner,
and their conduct was spoken of in high terms of encomium by very many of
the French themselves. I regret however exceedingly that any of the British
officers should have imbibed the low prejudices and vulgar hatred against
the French, which certain people preach up in England to cover their own
peculations and interested views. A young friend of mine, with whom I was
one day talking on political subjects, said to me: "I cannot help agreeing
with you in many things, but I am staggered when I think that your ideas
and reasoning are so contrary to the ideas in which I have been brought up;
so that I rather avoid entering at all on political questions."

I do not wonder at all at this, for I recollect when I was at school at
Eton, the system was to drill into the heads of the boys strong
aristocratic principles and hatred of Democracy and of the French in
particular; we were ordered to write themes against the French Revolution
and verses of triumph over their defeats, with now and then a sly theme on
the great advantage of hereditary nobility; in these verses God Almighty
was to be represented as closely allied to the British Government and a
_sleeping partner_ of the Administration. One of the fellows of Eton
College actually told the late Mr Adam Walker, the celebrated lecturer on
natural and experimental philosophy, who was accustomed to give lectures
annually to the Etonians, that his visits were no longer agreeable and
would be dispensed with in future; as "Philosophy had done a great deal of
harm and had caused the French Revolution."

With respect to my visit to Versailles, I was much struck with the vast
size and magnificence of the buildings and with the ingenuity displayed in
the arrangement of the grounds and the numerous groups of statues,
grottos, aqueducts, fountains and ruins. Still it pleases me less than St
Cloud, for I prefer the taste of the present day in gardening and the
arrangement of ground, to the ponderous and tawdry taste of the time of
Louis XIV, and I prefer St Cloud to Versailles, just as I should prefer a
Grecian Nymph in the simple costume of Arcadia to a fine court lady rouged
and dressed out with hoops, diamonds, and headdress of the tune of Queen
Anne. Napoleon must have had an exquisite taste.

[32] Ex