turally to memoirs and anecdotes, in which there is no improvement to desire but that they were true. A bon mot has not that fugitive value in France which it has elsewhere: it is eagerly propagated, and treasured up in books, as if it were the weightiest of events. The Frenchman is a peaceable citizen, and revenges himself for any oppressive acts of the Farmers-General by satires or by parliamentary remonstrances--which, having fulfilled their purposes by shedding a patriotic éclat over the fathers of the people, are dismissed to be celebrated by the poets. The great object, to which the meritorious qualities and national capacities of this people are mainly referred, is the female sex. Not that woman is in France more loved or esteemed than elsewhere, but because it is woman that furnishes the occasion for exhibiting in the best attitude the darling talents of wit-good breeding-and polished manners: in fact a vain person loves in either sex nobody but himself; all other persons are simply the engines by which he makes the most favourable display of his own advantages. As the French are not wanting in noble qualities, which however can be animated and excited only by the feeling of the Beautiful, -it is evident that the fair sex would have it in its power to animate the men to noble actions beyond what is seen in any other part of the world, if there were any disposition to favour this direction of the national temper. Pity that the lilies do not spin !-The fault, to which the character of this nation most verges, is the tendency to trifling, or (to express it by a more courteous expression) to levity. Matters of weight are treated as jests; and trifles serve for the most serious occupation of the faculties. In old age the Frenchman is still sing ing songs of pleasure, and to the best of his power is still gallant to the women. In speaking thus I have high authorities to warrant me from amongst the French themselves; and I shall shelter myself from any displeasure which I might else incur by pleading the sanction of a Montesquieu and a D'Alembert.—The Englishman, at the commencement ofevery acquaintance, is cold and reserved; and to

wards all strangers is indifferent. He has little inclination to show any complaisance or obligingness in trifles: on the other hand, where he feels sincere friendship, he is disposed to express it by important services. He gives himself very little trouble to display wit in conversation, or to recommend himself by any politeness of manner: on the other hand his demeanour expresses high good sense and sobriety of mind. The Englishman is bad at imitation: he asks little about other people's opinions, and follows nothing but his own taste and humour. In relation to women he does not manifest the French spirit of courtly homage, but nevertheless testifies far more of sincere respect for them: indeed he pushes this too far, and in the married state usually allows his wife an unlimited influence. He is firm, at times even to obstinacy; bold, and resolute even to rashness; and he acts in general upon principle in a degree amounting almost to obduracy. He is prone to fall into eccentricity of habits or opinions, not from vanity-but because he has a slight regard for what others say or think, and because he is not forward to put any force on his own inclinations out of complaisance or out of imitation: on this account he is rarely so much beloved as the Frenchman; but, when he is once known, much more respected.-The German has a mixed temper composed of the English and the French, but partaking much more of the first; and, whenever a German discovers a closer resemblance to the Frenchman, it is undoubtedly an artificial or mimical resemblance. He has a happy equilibrium of sensibility to the Sublime and the Beautiful: and if he does not rival the Englishman in the first nor the Frenchman in the second, yet he surpasses either separately in so far as he combines them both. He discovers more urbanity in social inter course than the Englishman; and, if he does not bring into company so much wit and agreeable vivacity as the Frenchman, he manifests more modesty and good sense. In love, as in every other direction of taste, he is tolerably methodic; and, because he combines the sense of the

Beautiful with the sense of the Sublime, he is cold enough, in contemplating either separately, to keep his head free for considerations of decorum, of pomp, and show. Hence it is that, in his civil relations no less than in love, family-rank-and titles are matters of supreme importance. He inquires far more earnestly than either the Frenchman or the Englishman-what people will think of him: and, if there is any one feature of his character which calls aloud for a capital improvement, it is this very weakness-which is the cause that he shrinks with timidity from the hardiness of originality even when he has all the talents for it; and, through this over-anxiety about the opinions of others, his moral qualities lose all ground of stability-and become fickle as the weather, hollow, and artificial.The Dutchman is of a regular and pains-taking temper; and, looking only to the Useful, he has little sensibility to that which in a finer sense is either Beautiful or Sublime. A great man is equivalent in his vocabulary to a rich man; by a friend he means a correspondent; and a visit is exceedingly tedious to him, unless it returns some nett profit. He is the ideal contrast to the Frenchman as well as to the Englishman; and may be briefly described as a phlegmatic German.

If we make an attempt to apply these thoughts to any particular case, -as for instance to the feeling for honour and distinction, the following national differences discover themselves. The sensibility to honour is, in the Frenchman vanity; in the Spaniard arrogance; in the Englishman pride; in the German haughtiness; and in the Dutchman (sit venia verbo!) pomposity. These expressions may seem at first sight to be equipollent; but they denote very remarkable differences. Vanity courts approbation, is inconstant and changeable, but its outward demeanour is courteous. The arrogant man is bloated with a false and pleasurable conceit of himself, which he takes little trouble to support by the appro

bation of others: his deportment is stiff and unbending. Pride is, strictly speaking, nothing more than a greater consciousness of one's own merits; and this consciousness may often be very justly founded; whence it is that we talk of a "noble pride;" but we can never attribute to a man a noble arrogance, because this always indicates an ill-founded and exaggerated self-estimation: the deportment of the proud man towards others is cold and expressive of indifference. The haughty man is a proud man that is at the same time a vain one.* The approbation, however, which he solicits from others, must be shown in testimonies of respect. Therefore it is that he would willingly glitter with titles-genealogies-and external pageantry. The German beyond all other people is infected with this infirmity. The words Gracious," 'High-born,' 'Well-born,' and the rest of that bombastic diction, make the German language stiff and unwieldy

and stand in the way of that beautiful simplicity which other nations have been able to communicate to their style. The characteristic of the haughty man's demeanour in company is-ceremoniousness. The pompous man is he who expresses his selfconceit by clear marks of contempt for others. The characteristic of his behaviour is coarseness. This wretched temper is of all the furthest removed from polished taste, because obviously and unequivocally stupid; for assuredly it is no rational means of gratifying the passion for honour→→→→ to challenge every body about one by undisguised contempt to hatred and caustic ridicule.

Religion, in our quarter of the globe, is not the offspring of tastebut has a more venerable derivation. Hence it is only the aberrations of men in religion, and that which may be regarded as strictly of human origin, which can furnish any means of determining the differences of national characters. These aberrations I arrange under the following classes

credulity, superstition, fanaticism, and indifference. Credulity is, for

*

the most part, the characteristic of the uninformed part of every nation, although they have no remarkable fineness of feelings. Their convictions depend merely upon hear-say and upon plausible appearances; and with the impulses to these convictions no refinement of feeling is blended. Illustrations of this must be sought for amongst the nations of the north. The credulous man, when his taste is at all barbaresque, becomes superstitious. Nay, this taste is of itself a ground of credulity and if we suppose the case of two men, one of them infected with this taste and the other of a colder and less passionate frame of mind, the first, even though he should possess a much more powerful understanding, will nevertheless be sooner seduced by his predominant feeling to believe any thing unnatural than the other-whom not his discernment but his common-place and phlegmatic feelings have preserved from this aberration of the judgment. The superstitious man places between himself and the supreme object of his adoration certain mighty and marvellous men―giants, if I may so express myself, of religion-whom nature obeys whose adjuring voice opens and shuts the iron gate of Tartarus-and who, whilst with their heads they reach the heavens, plant their feet upon the earth. Intellectual culture will on this account have great obstacles to overcome in Spain; not so much from the ignorance with which it has to contend, as because it is thwarted by a perverted taste which never feels itself in a state of elevated emotion unless where its object is barbaresque. Fanaticism is a sort of devout temerity, and is occasioned by a peculiar pride and

an

excess of self-confidence-with the view of stepping nearer to the divine nature, and raising itself above the ordinary and prescribed course of things. The fanatic talks of nothing but immediate revelations, and of direct intuitions; whereas the super

stitious man spreads before these great images a veil of wonder-working saints, and rests his whole confidence upon the imaginary and inimitable perfections of other persons participating a common nature with himself. I have before remarked that the intellectual aberrations carry signs along with them of the national character of feeling: and hence it is that fanaticism has been chiefly found (formerly at least) in Germany and in England, and is to be regarded as an unnatural product of the noble feeling which belongs to the characters of these two nations. And let it be observed that fanaticism is not by many degrees so injurious as superstition, although at first it is more outrageous: for the fervours of a fanatical mind cool and effervesce by degrees, and agreeably to the general analogies of nature must at length subside to the ordinary level of temperature: whereas superstition roots itself continually deeper and deeper in a quiet and passive frame of mind, and robs the fettered being of all the confidence requisite for ever liberating itself from a pestilent delusion. -Finally, the vain and frivolous man is always without any powerful feeling for the Sublime: his religion therefore is unempassioned and generally an affair of fashion which he goes through with the utmost goodbreeding and entire cold-heartedness. This is practical indifference, to which the French national mind seems to be the most inclined; from this to the prophanest mockery of religion there is but one step: and, to say the truth, estimated by its inner value-indifference seems but trivially preferable to the entire rejection of religion.

If we throw a hasty glance over the other quarters of the world, we find the Arabs-the noblest people of the East, but of a temperament in respect to taste which tends much to the barbaresque and the unnaturally romantic. The Arab is hospitable, magnanimous, and observant of his

word: but his fictions and his history and his whole feelings are vein'ed and coloured with the marvellous. His inflamed imagination presents objects in unnatural and distorted images; and even the propagation of his religion was a great romance. If the Arabs are as it were the Asiatic Spaniards, the Persians are the Asiatic Frenchmen. They are good poets, courteous, and of tolerably refined taste. They are not rigorous followers of Islam; and they allow to their own voluptuous tendencies a pretty latitudinarian interpretation of the Koran. The Japanese may be regarded partially as the Englishman of the Oriental world; but hardly for any other qualities than their firmness which degenerates into obstinacy-their courage and their contempt of death. In all other respects they show few marks of the grand English style of mind. The nations of India discover a domineering taste for fooleries of that class which run into the barbaresque. Their religion is made up of fooleries. Idols of hideous forms, the invaluable tooth of the mighty ape Hanumann, the unnatural penances of the Fakir (the mendicant friar of Paganism), are all in this taste. The self-immolations of women, on the same funeral pile which consumes the corpses of their husbands, are abominable instances of the barbaresque. What senseless fooleries are involved in the prolix and elaborate compliments of the Chinese! even their paintings are senseless, and exhibit marvellous forms that are nowhere to be seen in nature. They have also, more than any people on earth besides, traditional fooleries that are consecrated by ancient usage; such for instance as the ceremony still retained at Pekin, during an eclipse of the sun or the moon, of driving away the dragon that is attempting to swallow up those heavenly bodies-a ceremony derived from the elder ages of grossest ignorance and still retained in defiance of better information.

The negroes of Africa have from nature no feeling which transcends the childish level. Mr. Hume chal

lenges any man to allege a single case in which a negro has shown the least talent, and maintains-that, out of all the hundreds of thousands of Blacks who have been transported from their native homes to other countries, not one (though many have been manumitted) has been found that has ever performed any thing great either in art-science-or any other creditable path of exertion; whereas among the Whites many are continually rising to distinction from the lowest classes of the people: so radical is the difference between these two races of men; a difference which seems to be not less in regard to the intellectual faculties than in regard to colour. The religion which is so widely diffused amongst them, viz. the Fetish, is probably that form of idolatry which descends as profoundly into imbecile folly as human nature can tolerate. A bird's feather, a cow's horn, a cockle-shell, or any other trifle, is no sooner consecrated by a few words, than it becomes an object of adoration-and of adjuration in the taking of oaths. The Blacks are very vain, but after a negro fashion; and so talkative that it is necessary to cudgel them asunder.

Amongst all savages there are no tribes which discover so elevated a character as those of North America. They have a strong passion for honour; and, whilst in chace of it, they pursue wild adventures for hundreds of miles, they are exceedingly cautious to avoid the slightest violations of it when an enemy as stern as themselves, having succeeded in making them prisoners, endeavours to extort from their agonies sighs of weakness and of fear. The Čanadian savage is veracious and upright. The friendship, which he contracts, is as romantic and as enthusiastic as any thing which has descended to us from the fabulous times of antiquity. He is proud in excess, is sensible of the whole value of freedom, and even through the period of education he brooks no treatment which could subject him to a degrading submission. Lycurgus in all probability gave laws

to just such savages: and, if a great lawgiver were to arise amongst the Six Nations, the world would behold a Spartan republic arise amongst the savages of the new world; as in fact the voyage of the Argonauts is not very dissimilar to the military expeditions of the Indians; and Jason has little advantage of Attakakullakulla except in the honour of a Grecian name. All these savages have little sensibility to the Beautiful in a moral sense; and the magnanimous forgiveness of an injury, which is at the same time noble and beautiful, is wholly unknown to savages as a virtue, and despised as a miserable weakness. Courage is the supreme merit of the savage; and Revenge his sweetest pleasure. The other natives of this quarter of the globe show few traces of a temperament open to the finer impressions of sentiment; and indeed the general characteristic of this division of mankind is an extraordinary defect of sensibility.

rum.

If we examine the state of the sexual relations in these various regions of the earth, we find that the European only has discovered the secret of adorning the sensual attractions of a mighty passion with so many flowers, and of interweaving it with so much of moral feeling, that he has not only exalted its fascinations, but has also brought it entire ly within the limits of social decoThe Orientalist is, in this point, of very false taste. Having no idea of the morally Beautiful that may be connected with this instinct, he forfeits even the better part of the mere sensual pleasure; and his Harem becomes to him a perpetual source of inquietude. Woman on her part, degraded to the level of the mere instrument and means of sensual pleasures, loses all her dignityand consequently her personal rights. Whether as an unmarried virgin, or as the wife of a jealous and intractable brute, she is in the east eternally a prisoner.-Amongst the Blacks, what can a man look for better than what in fact is everywhere foundthat is to say, the whole female sex in a state of the profoundest slavery? A faint-hearted man is always a severe master to his weaker dependants; just as with us that man is sure to play the tyrant in his own kitchen, who has hardly courage

enough to look any body in the face when he steps out of doors. Pere Labat indeed tells us that a negro gentleman, whom he had been reproaching with his tyrannical treatment of his women, returned this answer: "You Whites are downright fools: for you first of all allow your wives too much liberty; and then you complain when they abuse it-and make your heads ache." At first sight it might seem as if there was something in this remark which merited a little attention: but, to cut the matter short, the fellow was a Black-black as soot from head to foot: an unanswerable proof that what he said was bestially stupid. Of all savages there are none amongst whom women enjoy more real consideration and influence than the noble savages of North America. In this point indeed, perhaps the Canadian women have the advantage of those even in our refined quarter of the globe. I do not mean that any submissive attentions and homage are there paid to women: these are mere forms of hollow compliment. No, the Canadian women enjoy actual power: they meet and deliberate upon the weightiest ordinances of the nation-whether regarding peace or war. Upon the result of their debates they dispatch delegates to the male council; and commonly it is their voice which prevails, This privilege however they purchase dearly: all the household concerns are thrown on their shoulders; and they take their share in all the hardships and toils of the men.

Finally, if we cast a glance over the page of history, we perceive the taste of men-like a Proteus-everlastingly assuming new and variable forms. The ancient times of the Greeks and Romans exhibited unequivocal marks of a legitimate feeling for the Beautiful as well as the Sublime in Poetry, Sculpture, Architecture, Legislation, and even in Morals. The government of the Roman Emperors changed the noble as well as the beautiful simplicity into the magnificent and gorgeous-and at length into that spurious glitter of finery which still survives for our instruction in their rhetoric, their poetry, and even in the history of their manners. Gradually, and in sympathy with the general decline of the state,