again, with sundry fresh interludes.

All this is highly amusing to the English Public to _hear_ and _read_
of; but I doubt whether our countrymen would like to be actual
_performers_ in such a drama.

Whether the French really are so, or whether they are mystifying us in
the accounts they send over, I will not presume to decide. But if the
former supposition be the true one,—if they have been so long really
acting over and over again in their own persons such a drama, it must
be allowed that they deserve to be characterized as they have been in
the description given of certain European nations: "An Englishman," it
has been said, "is never happy but when he is miserable; a Scotchman
is never at home but when he is abroad; an Irishman is never at peace
but when he is fighting; a Spaniard is never at liberty but when he is
enslaved; and a Frenchman is never settled but when he is engaged in a
revolution."




POSTSCRIPT TO THE TWELFTH EDITION.


"Time" says the proverb, "rings Truth to light." But the process is
gradual and slow. The debt is paid, as it were, by instalments. It is
only bit by bit, and at considerable intervals, that Truth comes forth
as the morning twilight to dispel the mists of fiction.

It is above forty years that men have been debating the question:—Who