limited direction; reducing them, considered as spiritual beings, to
a kind of negative existence. All these things I did not perceive till
long afterwards; but I even then felt, though without stating it
clearly to myself, the contrast between the frank sociability and
amiability of French personal intercourse, and the English mode of
existence, in which everybody acts as if everybody else (with few, or
no exceptions) was either an enemy or a bore. In France, it is true,
the bad as well as the good points, both of individual and of national
character, come more to the surface, and break out more fearlessly in
ordinary intercourse, than in England: but the general habit of the
people is to show, as well as to expect, friendly feeling in every one
towards every other, wherever there is not some positive cause for the
opposite. In England it is only of the best bred people, in the upper
or upper middle ranks, that anything like this can be said.

In my way through Paris, both going and returning, I passed some time
in the house of M. Say, the eminent political economist, who was a
friend and correspondent of my father, having become acquainted with
him on a visit to England a year or two after the Peace. He was a man
of the later period of the French Revolution, a fine specimen of the
best kind of French Republican, one of those who had never bent the
knee to Bonaparte though courted by him to do so; a truly upright,
brave, and enlightened man. He lived a quiet and studious life, made
happy by warm affections, public and private. He was acquainted with
many of the chiefs of the Liberal party, and I saw various noteworthy
persons while staying at this house; among whom I have pleasure in the
recollection of having once seen Saint-Simon, not yet the founder
either of a philosophy or a religion, and considered only as a clever
original. The chief fruit which I carried away from the society I saw,
was a strong and permanent interest in Continental Liberalism, of