reat generalizers in
philosophy; they reduce human actions to two grand touchstones. All
hilarity, they consider the sign of a shallow mind; and all kindness,
the token of a false heart."

CHAPTER XVI.

Quis sapiens bono Confidat fragili.--Seneca.

Grammatici certant et adhuc sub judice lis est.--Horace.

When I first went to Paris, I took a French master, to perfect me in the
Parisian pronunciation. This "Haberdasher of Pronouns" was a person of
the name of Margot. He was a tall, solemn man, with a face of the most
imperturbable gravity. He would have been inestimable as an undertaker.
His hair was of a pale yellow; you would have thought it had caught a
bilious complaint from his complexion; the latter was, indeed, of so
sombre a saffron, that it looked as if ten livers had been forced into
a jaundice, in order to supply its colour. His forehead was high, bald,
and very narrow. His cheekbones were extremely prominent, and his cheeks
so thin, that they seemed happier than Pyramus and Thisbe, and kissed
each other inside without any separation or division. His face was as
sharp and almost as long as an inverted pyramid, and was garnished on
either side by a miserable half starved whisker, which seemed scarcely
able to maintain itself, amid the general symptoms of atrophy and
decay. This charming countenance was supported by a figure so long, so
straight, so shadowy, that you might have taken it for the monument in a
consumption.

But the chief characteristic of the man was the utter and wonderful
gravity I have before spoken of. You could no more have coaxed a
smile out of his countenance, than you could out of the poker, and yet
Monsieur Margot was by no means a melancholy man. He loved his joke,
and his wine, and his dinner, just as much as if he had been of a fatter
frame; and it was a fine specimen of the practical antithesis, to hear
a good story, or a jovial expression, leap friskily out of that long,
curved mouth; it was at once a paradox and a bathos--it was the mouse
coming out of its hole in Ely Cathedral.

I said that this gravity was M. Margot's most especial characteristic.
I forgot:--he had two others equally remarkable; the one was an ardent
admiration for the chivalrous, the other an ardent admiration for
himself. Both of these are traits common enough in a Frenchman, but in
Mons. Margot their excesses rendered them uncommon. He was a most ultra
specimen of le chevalier amoureux--a mixture o