had had any knowledge of the language and the country, he might have come off nobly, by proposing a boxing bout to the man whom he thought weakest amongst the crowd of assailants: if victorious, he would have been honourably brought home, and had his triumph celebrated even by those who now joined against him. This is the first law of this species of combat; a law which the English punctually observe in the heat of battle, where the vanquished always find a generous conqueror in that nation. This should seem to prove, in contradiction to Hobbes, that in the state of nature, a state with which the street-scufflers of London are closely connected, man, who is by fits wicked and cruel, is, at the bottom, good-natured and generous. "I have already observed, that the English themselves are not secure from the insolence of the London mob. I had a proof of this from the young Surgeon who accompanied me from Paris to Boulogne. "At the first visit which he paid me in London, he informed me, that, a few days after his arrival, happening to take a walk through the fields on the Surrey-side of the Thames, dressed in a little green frock which he had brought from Paris, he was attacked by three of those gentlemen of the mobility, who, taking him for a Frenchman, not only abused him with the foulest language, but gave him two or three slaps on the face. 'Luckily,' added he in French, 'I did not return their ill language; for, if I had, they would certainly have thrown me into the Thames, as they assured me they would, as soon as they perceived I was an Englishman, if I ever happened to come in their way again in my Paris dress.' "A Portuguese of my acquaintance, taking a walk in the same fields, with three of his countrymen, their conversation in Portuguese was interrupted by two Watermen, who, doubling their fists at them, cried, 'French dogs, speak your damned French, if you dare.' "Happening to go one evening from the part of the town where I lived to the Museum, I passed by the Seven-dials. The place was crowded with people waiting to see a poor wretch stand in the pillory, whose punishment was deferred to another day. The mob, provoked at this disappointment, vented their rage upon all that passed that way, whether a-foot or in coaches; and threw at them dirt, rotten eggs, dead dogs, and all sorts of trash and ordure, which they had provided to pelt the unhappy wretch, according to custom. Their fury fell chiefly upon the hackney-coaches, the drivers of which they forced to salute them with their whips and their hats, and to cry _huzza_; which word is a signal for rallying in all public frays. The disturbance upon this occasion was so much the greater, as the person who was to have acted the principal part in the scene, which by being postponed had put the rabble into such an ill-humour, belonged to the nation which that rabble thinks it has most right to insult.