d. They amount to perhaps a few
thousands in Paris, comprising a number of the students in law and
medicine, many of the painters, musical professors, and at least half
the literary characters in Paris; some of them are either the editors
their subs or the communicators to two-thirds of the newspapers at
Paris. I must do them the justice to say that I believe they mean well,
and that they are actuated by pure principles of patriotism, full of
candour and of courage, but mistaken in their views, led away by false
notions imbibed from an enthusiastic admiration of the deeds of heroes,
recorded in the histories of Rome and Greece, until they imagine that
they are bound in modern days to re-enact the glorious examples of their
progenitors in their self devotion for their country; hence the
wonderful resistance that they made in 1832, which although in a bad
cause, proved their contempt for life, and how ready they were to risk
it in what they falsely thought their country's cause.

But as they get older and reflect more, they become more temperate in
their mode of reasoning, at present, and indeed for some time past, they
have been more calm and one hears less of them.

CHAPTER V.

Anecdotes illustrative of the ideas, feelings, and characters of
the Parisians, also narrating some of their most striking national
peculiarities.

The French generally have been celebrated for possessing no
inconsiderable share of conceit, but in regard to a most exalted respect
for themselves, the Parisians far surpass all their provincial brethren;
the very circumstance of their happening to be born in Paris, they
imagine at once confers upon them a diploma of the very highest acme of
civilisation, causing them to feel a sort of pity for a person who is
born elsewhere; however, as one of these enlightened spirits once
observed to me, that a person might by coming to live at Paris in the
course of time imbibe the same tone of refinement. Now this was said in
all the true spirit of human kindness; he knew that I was not born in
Paris, and conceiving that I might feel the bitterness of that
misfortune, though it might afford me a degree of consolation to be
assured, that there were some means of repairing the disadvantages under
which I laboured, from not having made my entrance to the world in the
grand metropolis of France.

It matters not how low may be the calling of a Parisian, he will still
flatter himself that