and finds all barren. The latter wishes to introduce absolute
government into England, supported by an army of five hundred thousand
men and a censorship of the press. THREADPAPER is of tender years; his
moustache is downy, indeed hardly visible without a glass; he will grown
wiser with time, but MR. DOWLAS, I very much fear, is beyond all cure.

D., you old humbug! what do you mean by uttering your shallow vulgar
criticism on the greatest nation of Continental Europe? You know nothing
of their history, except that they were beaten at the battle of
Waterloo; you can't speak a word of their language; you can't read one
of their newspapers; you are supremely ignorant of their character and
institutions, and yet you treat them as a mob of hairdressers, dancing
masters, and cooks (and not good cooks either), and exult in the
time-honoured conviction that one Englishman can thrash two Frenchmen.
DOWLAS, attend to me, I am going to talk about taste--a word that ought
to excite shame and anguish in your mind. For a quarter of a century you
have been smothering the world with printed fabrics of fantastic and
horrible ugliness. Millions upon millions of yards of these abominations
have found their way into every nook and corner of the world. Remote
tribes of wandering Tartars and the squaws of painted Choktaws have clad
their bodies and depraved their souls with your outrageous patterns.
Bales marked with the well-known D. (oh, how could you, MR. DOWLAS,
Sir?) have carried their baleful influence into the innocent populations
of the Peaceful Ocean. The least hideous of these productions are those
you have stolen (and spoiled) from the French, and if there is any
improvement in your patterns of late years, it is entirely to be
attributed to your piracy of French designs.

The fact is, that France has become the Mistress of Arts to the world.
If England lives in a fever of industry, _she_ lives in a fever of
invention. Every novelty we have is due to her restless creative spirit.
In arts, in letters, in philosophy, she scatters abroad new ideas with
unsparing profusion; other nations, following with unequal steps,
treasure up what falls, and claim it as their own. This exuberance of
fancy is only the result of the universal artistic feeling which seems
to animate her citizens. You cannot go anywhere in Paris without being
conscious of this. Every shop window is a picture. Look at that
pastrycook's. A few pieces of china and half-