is handsome; if not, to your sister, or daughter, or niece. If
he suffers a repulse from your wife, or attempts in vain to
debauch your sister, or your daughter, or your niece, he will,
rather than not play the traitor with his gallantry, make his
addresses to your grandmother; and ten to one but in one shape or
another he will find means to ruin the peace of a family in which
he has been so kindly entertained. What he cannot accomplish by
dint of compliment and personal attendance, he will endeavour to
effect by reinforcing these with billets-doux, songs, and verses,
of which he always makes a provision for such purposes. If he is
detected in these efforts of treachery, and reproached with his
ingratitude, he impudently declares that what he had done was no
more than simple gallantry, considered in France as an
indispensable duty on every man who pretended to good breeding.
Nay, he will even affirm that his endeavours to corrupt your
wife, or deflower your daughter, were the most genuine proofs he
could give of his particular regard for your family.

"If there were five hundred dishes at table, a Frenchman will eat
of all of them, and then complain he has no appetite--this I have
several times remarked. A friend of mine gained a considerable
wager upon an experiment of this kind; the petit-maitre ate of
fourteen different plates, besides the dessert, then disparaged
the cook, declaring he was no better than a marmiton, or
turnspit."

The gross unfairness, no less than the consummate cleverness, of
this caricature compels us to remember that this was written in
the most insular period of our manners, and during a brief lull
in a century of almost incessant mutual hostility between the two