the
French may be sincere at the time, or arise out of the impulse of the
moment; though their desire to serve you may be neither very violent nor
very lasting. I cannot think, notwithstanding, that the French are not a
serious people; nay, that they are not a more reflecting people than
the common run of the English. Let those who think them merely light and
mercurial explain that enigma, their everlasting prosing tragedy. The
English are considered as comparatively a slow, plodding people. If the
French are quicker, they are also more plodding. See, for example, how
highly finished and elaborate their works of art are! How systematic and
correct they aim at being in all their productions of a graver cast!
'If the French have a fault,' as Yorick said, 'it is that they are
too grave.' With wit, sense, cheerfulness, patience, good-nature, and
refinement of manners, all they want is imagination and sturdiness of
moral principle! Such are some of the contradictions in the character
of the two nations, and so little does the character of either appear to
have been understood! Nothing can be more ridiculous indeed than the
way in which we exaggerate each other's vices and extenuate our own.
The whole is an affair of prejudice on one side of the question, and
of partiality on the other. Travellers who set out to carry back a
true report of the case appear to lose not only the use of their
understandings, but of their senses, the instant they set foot in a
foreign land. The commonest facts and appearances are distorted and
discoloured. They go abroad with certain preconceived notions on the
subject, and they make everything answer, in reason's spite, to their
favourite theory. In addition to the difficulty of explaining customs
and manners foreign to our own, there are all the obstacles of wilful
prepossession thrown in the way. It is not, therefore, much to be
wondered at that nations have arrived at so little knowledge of one
another's characters; and that, where the object has been to widen the
breach between them, any slight differences that occur are easily
blown into a blaze of fury by repeated misrepresentations, and all the
exaggerations that malice or folly can invent!

This ignorance of character is not confined to foreign nations: we are
ignorant of that of our own countrymen in a class a little below or
above ourselves. We shall hardly pretend to pronounce magisterially on
the good or bad qualities of strangers; an