or 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 nations. Aristocrats
like Walpole, Gibbon, and Chesterfield could regard France from a
cosmopolitan point of view, as leading the comite of nations. But to
sturdy and true-born patriots, such as Hogarth and Smollett, reciprocal
politeness appeared as grotesque as an exchange of amenities would be
between a cormorant and an ape. Consequently, it was no doubt with a
sense of positive relief to his feelings that Smollett could bring
himself to sum up the whole matter thus. "A Frenchman lays out his
whole revenue upon taudry suits of cloaths, or in furnishing a
magnificent repas of fifty or a hundred dishes, one-half of which are
not eatable or intended to be eaten. His wardrobe goes to the fripier,
his dishes to the dogs, and himself to the devil."

These trenchant passages were written partly, it may be imagined, to
suit the English taste of the day. In that object they must have
succeeded, for they were frequently transcribed into contemporary
periodicals. In extenuation of Smollett's honesty of purpose, however,
it may be urged that he was always a thoroughgoing patriot, [Witness
his violently anti-French play, the Reprisal of 1757.] and that, coming
from a Calvinistic country where a measure of Tartufism was a necessary
condition of respectability, he reproduces the common English error of
ignoring how apt a Frenchman is to conceal a number of his best
qualities. Two other considerations deserve attention. The
race-portrait was in Smollett's day at the very height of its
disreputable reign. Secondly, we must remember how very profoundly
French character has been modified since 1763, and more especially in
consequence of the cataclysms of 1789 and 1870.

Smollett's vis comica is conspicuous in the account of the coiffure of
the period and of the superstitious r