come what, come will.]

You will remember, I say nothing in favour of the French tragic
representations. When a great and an intellectual nation, like France,
unites to applaud images and sentiments that are communicated through
their own peculiar forms of speech, it becomes a stranger to distrust
his own knowledge, rather than their taste. I dare say that were I more
accustomed to the language, I might enjoy Corneille and Racine, and even
Voltaire, for I can now greatly enjoy Moliere; but, to be honest in the
matter, all reciters of heroic French poetry appear to me to depend on a
pompous declamation, to compensate for the poverty of the idioms, and
the want of nobleness in the expressions. I never heard any one, poet or
actor, he who read his own verses, or he who repeated those of others,
who did not appear to mouth, and all their tragic playing has had the
air of being on stilts. Napoleon has said, from the sublime to the
ridiculous it is but a step. This is much truer in France than in most
other countries, for the sublime is commonly so sublimated, that it will
admit of no great increase. Racine, in a most touching scene, makes one
of his heroic characters offer to wipe off the tears of a heroine lest
they should discolour her _rouge_! I had a classmate at college, who was
so very ultra courtly in his language, that he never forgot to say, Mr.
Julius Caesar, and Mr. Homer.

There exists a perfect mania for letters throughout Europe, in this
"piping time of peace." Statesmen, soldiers, peers, princes, and kings,
hardly think themselves _illustrated_, until each has produced his book.
The world never before saw a tithe of the names of people of condition,
figuring in the catalogues of its writers. "Some thinks he writes
Cinna--he owns to Panurge," applies to half the people one meets in
society. I was at a dinner lately, given by the Marquis de ----, when
the table was filled with peers, generals, ex-ministers, ex-ambassadors,
naturalists, philosophers, and statesmen of all degrees. Casting my eyes
round the circle, I was struck with the singular prevalence of the
_cacoethes scribendi_, among so many men of different educations,
antecedents, and pursuits. There was a soldier present who had written
on taste, a politician on the art of war, a _diplomate_ who had dabbled
in poetry, and a jurist who pretended to enlighten the world in ethics,
it was the drollest assemblage in the world, and suggested many queer
associ