oo. National vanity, sir, wounded--we have beaten them
so often." My dear sir, there is not a greater error in the world
than this. They hate you because you are stupid, hard to please,
and intolerably insolent and air-giving. I walked with an Englishman
yesterday, who asked the way to a street of which he pronounced the name
very badly to a little Flemish boy: the Flemish boy did not answer; and
there was my Englishman quite in a rage, shrieking in the child's ear
as if he must answer. He seemed to think that it was the duty of "the
snob," as he called him, to obey the gentleman. This is why we are
hated--for pride. In our free country a tradesman, a lackey, or a
waiter will submit to almost any given insult from a gentleman: in these
benighted lands one man is as good as another; and pray God it may soon
be so with us! Of all European people, which is the nation that has the
most haughtiness, the strongest prejudices, the greatest reserve, the
greatest dulness? I say an Englishman of the genteel classes. An honest
groom jokes and hobs-and-nobs and makes his way with the kitchen-maids,
for there is good social nature in the man; his master dare not unbend.
Look at him, how he scowls at you on your entering an inn-room; think
how you scowl yourself to meet his scowl. To-day, as we were walking and
staring about the place, a worthy old gentleman in a carriage, seeing a
pair of strangers, took off his hat and bowed very gravely with his
old powdered head out of the window: I am sorry to say that our first
impulse was to burst out laughing--it seemed so supremely ridiculous
that a stranger should notice and welcome another.

As for the notion that foreigners hate us because we have beaten them
so often, my dear sir, this is the greatest error in the world:
well-educated Frenchmen DO NOT BELIEVE THAT WE HAVE BEATEN THEM. A man
was once ready to call me out in Paris because I said that we had beaten
the French in Spain; and here before me is a French paper, with a
London correspondent discoursing about Louis Buonaparte and his jackass
expedition to Boulogne. "He was received at Eglintoun, it is true," says
the correspondent, "but what do you think was the reason? Because the
English nobility were anxious to revenge upon his person (with some
coups de lance) the checks which the 'grand homme' his uncle had
inflicted on us in Spain."

This opinion is so general among the French, that they would laugh at
you with scornful incr