rt tranquilly observed, "The English are affable to no other
nation than themselves," he spoke for the centuries to come.
Sorbieres, who visited England in 1663, who loved the English turf,
hated and feared the English cooking, and deeply admired his
hospitable English hosts, admitted that the nation had "a propensity
to scorn all the rest of the world." The famous verdict, "_Les Anglais
sont justes, mais pas bons_," crystallizes the judgment of time.
Foreign opinion is necessarily an imperfect diagnosis, but it has
its value to the open mind. He is a wise man who heeds it, and a dull
man who holds it in derision. When an English writer in "Macmillan"
remarks with airy contempt that French criticisms on England have
"all the piquancy of a woman's criticisms on a man," the
American--standing outside the ring--is amused by this superb
simplicity of self-conceit.

Fear of a French invasion and the carefully nurtured detestation of
the Papacy,--these two controlling influences must be held
responsible for prejudices too deep to be fathomed, too strong to
be overcome. "We do naturally hate the French," observes Mr. Pepys,
with genial candour; and this ordinary, everyday prejudice darkened
into fury when Napoleon's conquests menaced the world. Our school
histories have taught us (it is the happy privilege of a school
history to teach us many things which make no impression on our minds)
that for ten years England apprehended a descent upon her shores;
but we cannot realize what the apprehension meant, how it ate its
way into the hearts of men, until we stumble upon some such paragraph
as this, from a letter of Lord Jeffrey's, written to Francis Horner
in the winter of 1808: "For my honest impression is that Bonaparte
will be in Dublin in about fifteen months, perhaps. And then, if I
survive, I shall try to go to America."

"If I survive!" What wonder that Jeffrey, who was a clear-headed,
unimaginative man, cherished all his life a cold hostility to France?
What wonder that the painter Haydon, who was highly imaginative and
not in the least clear-headed, felt such hostility to be an essential
part of patriotism? "In _my_ day," he writes in his journal, "boys
were born, nursed, and grew up, hating and to hate the name of
Frenchman." He did hate it with all his heart, but then his earliest
recollection--when he was but four years old--was seeing his mother
lying on her sofa and crying bitterly. He crept up to her, puzzled
and