el with a wonderful confidence which may very well be called
impudence ... all their learning is in wearing their clothes well; they
have very much without their heads, very little within; and they are
very much more solicitous that their periwigs fit handsomely, than to
speak discreetly; they laugh at what they do not understand, which
understanding so little, makes their laughter very immoderate. When they
have been at home two or three years, which they spend in the vanities
which they brought over with them, fresh travellers arrive with newer
fashions, and the same confidence, and are looked upon as finer
gentlemen, and wear their ribbons more gracefully; at which the others
are angry, quit the stage, and would fain get into wiser company, where
they every day find defects in themselves, which they owe to the ill
spending that time when they thought only of being fine gentlemen."[385]

When these products of a French education could not remain in town, but
were obliged to live on their estates amid rough country squires, it
went hard with them. "They will by no means embrace our way," says The
Country Gentleman in Clarendon's _Dialogue of the Want of Respect Due to
Age_, "but receive us with cringes and treat us with set speeches, and
complain how much it rains, that they cannot keep their hair dry, or
their linnen handsome one hour. They talk how much a better country
France is and how much they eat and drink better there, which our
neighbors will not believe, and laugh at them for saying so. They by no
means endure our exercises of hunting and hawking, nor indeed can their
tender bodies endure those violent motions. They have a guitar or some
other fiddle, which they play upon commonly an hour or so in their beds
before they rise, and have at least one French fellow to wait upon them,
to shave them, and comb their periwig; and he is sent into the kitchen
to dress some little dish, or to make some sauce for dinner, whom the
cook is hardly restrained from throwing into the fire. In a word, they
live to and within themselves, and their nearest neighbors do not know
whether they eat and drink or no."[386]

Not only were the recreations of their country neighbours violent and
unrefined, according to the English Messieurs, but that preoccupation
with local government, which was the chief duty of the country
gentleman, was beyond the capacity of those who by living abroad had
learned little of the laws and customs of the