Compare your mob, whether of gentlemen or plebeians, to those of Germany, Italy--even England--and I own, in spite of my national prepossessions, that the comparison is infinitely in your favour.

The country gentlemen, the lawyer, the petit maitre of England, are proverbially inane and ill-informed.

With you, the classes of society that answer to those respective grades, have much information in literature, and often not a little in science.

In like manner, your tradesmen, your mechanics, your servants, are, beyond all measure, of larger, better cultivated, and less prejudiced minds than those ranks in England.

The fact is, that all with you pretend to be savans, and this is the chief reason why you have been censured as shallow.