s of resemblance. But with regard to the other topics, would
it not be fair to say, in answer to such an argument--All this is mere
commonplace generality; such are the characters of every country where
European institutions exist, or European habits are to be found?
Something more tangible and specific is requisite to support your claim.
You are to prove that the picture is a portrait of a particular
person--and you say it has eyes and a nose; so have all portraits. But
where are the strokes that constitute identity, and determine the
original?--There is no mention of Crockford's or of the Missionary
Society, of the Old Bailey or the Foundling Hospital; and if Ordonez is
named, who gets rich by managing the affairs of the poor, this can never
be meant for a satire on the blundering pedantry of your Somerset-house
commissioners.--Here is no hint that can be tortured into a glance at
fox-hunters, or game-preservers, of the society for promoting rural
deans, at your double system of contradictory law, at special pleading
at quarter-sessions,{C} at the technical rigour of your institutions,
at the delay, chicanery, and expense of your judicial proceedings, at
the refinement, ease, wit, gayety, and disinterested respect for merit,
which, as every body knows, distinguish your social character; nothing
is said of the annual meeting of chemists, geologists, and
mathematicians, so beneficial to the real interests of science, by
making a turn for tumid metaphor and the love of display necessary
ingredients in the character of its votaries, extirpating from among
them that simplicity which was so fatal an obstacle to the progress of
Newton,--and turning the newly discovered joint of an antediluvian
reptile into a theme of perennial and ambitious declamation; nothing is
said about those discussions on baptismal fonts, those discoveries of
trochees for iambics, or the invention of new potatoe boilers, which in
the days of Hegel, Berryer, Schlosser, Savigny, and Cousin, are the
glory and delight of England; in short, there is nothing to fix the
allusions on which you rely on to distinguish them from those which
might be applicable to Paris, Vienna, or Madrid.

There are no people less disposed than ourselves to detract from the
merit of eminent French writers; they are always clear, elegant, and
judicious; often acute, eloquent, and profound. There is no department
of prose literature in which they do not equal us; there are many in