a politically
superior nationality. On the eve of parting from this remarkable
nation we may be allowed to call attention to the fact,
that in the accounts of the ancients as to the Celts on the Loire
and Seine we find almost every one of the characteristic traits
which we are accustomed to recognize as marking the Irish.
Every feature reappears: the laziness in the culture of the fields;
the delight in tippling and brawling; the ostentation--we may recall
that sword of Caesar hung up in the sacred grove of the Arverni
after the victory of Gergovia, which its alleged former owner viewed
with a smile at the consecrated spot and ordered the sacred property
to be carefully spared; the language full of comparisons and hyperboles,
of allusions and quaint turns; the droll humour--an excellent
example of which was the rule, that if any one interrupted a person
speaking in public, a substantial and very visible hole should be
cut, as a measure of police, in the coat of the disturber
of the peace; the hearty delight in singing and reciting the deeds
of past ages, and the most decided gifts of rhetoric and poetry;
the curiosity--no trader was allowed to pass, before he had told
in the open street what he knew, or did not know, in the shape of news--
and the extravagant credulity which acted on such accounts,
for which reason in the better regulated cantons travellers
were prohibited on pain of severe punishment from communicating
unauthenticated reports to others than the public magistrates;
the childlike piety, which sees in the priest a father and asks
for his counsel in all things; the unsurpassed fervour of national
feeling, and the closeness with which those who are fellow-countrymen
cling together almost like one family in opposition to strangers;
the inclination to rise in revolt under the first chance-leader
that presents himself and to form bands, but at the same time
the utter incapacity to preserve a self-reliant courage equally remote
from presumption and from pusillanimity, to perceive the right time
for waiting and for striking a blow, to attain or even barely
to tolerate any organization, any sort of fixed military or political
discipline. It is, and remains, at all times and all places
the same indolent and poetical, irresolute and fervid, inquisitive,
credulous, amiable, clever, but--in a political point of view--
thoroughly useless nation; and therefore its fate has been always
and everywhere the same.

The