for there is good social nature in the man; his master dare not unbend.
Look at him, how he scowls at you on your entering an inn-room; think
how you scowl yourself to meet his scowl. To-day, as we were walking and
staring about the place, a worthy old gentleman in a carriage, seeing a
pair of strangers, took off his hat and bowed very gravely with his
old powdered head out of the window: I am sorry to say that our first
impulse was to burst out laughing--it seemed so supremely ridiculous
that a stranger should notice and welcome another.

As for the notion that foreigners hate us because we have beaten them
so often, my dear sir, this is the greatest error in the world:
well-educated Frenchmen DO NOT BELIEVE THAT WE HAVE BEATEN THEM. A man
was once ready to call me out in Paris because I said that we had beaten
the French in Spain; and here before me is a French paper, with a
London correspondent discoursing about Louis Buonaparte and his jackass
expedition to Boulogne. "He was received at Eglintoun, it is true," says
the correspondent, "but what do you think was the reason? Because the
English nobility were anxious to revenge upon his person (with some
coups de lance) the checks which the 'grand homme' his uncle had
inflicted on us in Spain."

This opinion is so general among the French, that they would laugh at
you with scornful incredulity if you ventured to assert any other. Foy's
history of the Spanish War does not, unluckily, go far enough. I have
read a French history which hardly mentions the war in Spain, and calls
the battle of Salamanca a French victory. You know how the other day,
and in the teeth of all evidence, the French swore to their victory of
Toulouse: and so it is with the rest; and you may set it down as pretty
certain, 1st, That only a few people know the real state of things in
France, as to the matter in dispute between us; 2nd, That those who do,