n his bad French, that
an Englishman is the only European native brought up in the knowledge of
truth and the wash-tub.

By dint of time, iteration, and a considerable amount of that same
French I speak of, an article expressly manufactured for exportation, we
really did at last persuade patient and suffering Europe to take us
at our own valuation. We got them to believe that--with certain little
peculiarities, certain lesser vices, rather amiable than otherwise--no
nation, ancient or modern, could approach us. That we were at one and
the same time the richest, the strongest, the most honourable, the
most courageous people recorded in history; and not alone this, but the
politest and the most conciliatory, with the largest coal-fields and
the best cookery in Europe. Now, there is nothing more damaging than the
witness who proves too much. Miss Edgeworth tells us somewhere, I
think, of an Irish peer who, travelling in France with a negro servant,
directed him, if questioned on the subject, always to say his master was
a Frenchman. He was punctiliously faithful to his orders; but whenever
he said, "My massa a Frenchman," he always added, "So am I."

In the same spirit has Bull gone and damaged himself abroad. He might
have enjoyed an unlimited credit for his stories of English wealth and
greatness--how big was our fleet, and how bitter our beer; he might have
rung the changes over our just pride in our insular position and
our income-tax, and none dared to dispute him; but when, in the warm
expansiveness of his enthusiasm, he proceeded to say, not merely that we
dressed better and dined better than the foreigner, but that our manners
were more polished, our address more insinuating, and the amiability
of our whole social tone more conspicuous, "Mossoo," taking him to
represent all from Stockholm to Sicily, began to examine for himself,
and after some hesitation to ask, "What if the wealth be only like
the politeness? What if the national character be about as rude as the
cookery? What if English morality turn out to be a jumble and confusion,
very like English-French? Who is to tell us that the coal-fields may not
be as easily exhausted as the civility?" These were very ugly doubts,
and for some years back foreigners, after that slow fashion in which
public opinion moves amongst them, have been turning them over and over,
but in a manner that showed a great revulsion had taken place on the
Continent with regard to the es