My dear brother reader, say, as a man of honour, if you are not of this opinion?
Do you think a Frenchman your equal?
You don't--you gallant British Snob--you know you don't: no more, perhaps, does the Snob your humble servant, brother.
And I am inclined to think it is this conviction, and the consequent bearing of the Englishman towards the foreigner whom he condescends to visit, this confidence of superiority which holds up the head of the owner of every English hat-box from Sicily to St.Petersburg, that makes us so magnificently hated throughout Europe as we are; this--more than all our little victories, and of which many Frenchmen and Spaniards have never heard--this amazing and indomitable insular pride, which animates my lord in his travelling-carriage as well as John in the rumble.
If you read the old Chronicles of the French wars, you find precisely the same character of the Englishman, and Henry V.'s people behaved with just the cool domineering manner of our gallant veterans of France and the Peninsula.

Did you never hear Colonel Cutler and Major Slasher talking over the war after dinner?
or Captain Boarder describing his action with the 'Indomptable ?' 'Hang the fellows,' says Boarder, 'their practice was very good.

I was beat off three times before I took her.' 'Cuss those carabineers of Milhaud's,' says Slasher, 'what work they made of our light cavalry!' implying a sort of surprise that the Frenchman should stand up against Britons at all: a good-natured wonder that the blind, mad, vain-glorious, brave poor devils should actually have the courage to resist an Englishman.

Legions of such Englishmen are patronizing Europe at this moment, being kind to the Pope, or good-natured to the King of Holland, or condescending to inspect the Prussian reviews.

When Nicholas came here, who reviews a quarter of a million of pairs of moustaches to his breakfast every morning, we took him off to Windsor and showed him two whole regiments of six or eight hundred Britons a-piece, with an air as much as to say,--'There, my boy, look at THAT.