this account that Sterne would not
agree to die at the inn at Amiens. He might, with equal justice, have
objected to any other house; and I am sure if he thought them an
unpleasant people to die amongst, he would have found them still worse to
live with.--My observation as to the civility of aristocrates does not
hold good here--indeed I only meant that those who ever had any, and were
aristocrates, still preserved it.

Amiens has always been a commercial town, inhabited by very few of the
higher noblesse; and the mere gentry of a French province are not very
much calculated to give a tone of softness and respect to those who
imitate them. You may, perhaps, be surprized that I should express
myself with little consideration for a class which, in England, is so
highly respectable: there gentlemen of merely independent circumstances
are not often distinguishable in their manners from those of superior
fortune or rank. But, in France, it is different: the inferior noblesse
are stiff, ceremonious, and ostentatious; while the higher ranks were
always polite to strangers, and affable to their dependents. When you
visit some of the former, you go through as many ceremonies as though you
were to be invested with an order, and rise up and sit down so many
times, that you return more fatigued than you would from a cricket match;
while with the latter you are just as much at your ease as is consistent
with good breeding and propriety, and a whole circle is never put in
commotion at the entrance and exit of every individual who makes part of
it. Any one not prepared for these formalities, and who, for the first
time, saw an assembly of twenty people all rising from their seats at the
entrance of a single beau, would suppose they were preparing for a dance,
and that the new comer was a musician. For my part I always find it an
oeconomy of strength (when the locality makes it practicable) to take
possession of a window, and continue standing in readiness until the hour
of visiting is over, and calm is established by the arrangement of the
card tables.--The revolution has not annihilated the difference of rank;
though it has effected the abolition of titles; and I counsel all who
have remains of the gout or inflexible joints, not to frequent the houses
of ladies whose husbands have been ennobled only by their offices, of
those whose genealogies are modern, or of the collaterals of ancient
families, whose claims are so far removed