"Pardon me," interrupted De Montaigne, "I am speaking of your people, not of your government. A government is often a very unfair representative of a nation. But even in the wars you allude to, if you examine, you will generally find them originate in the love of justice, which is the basis of good sense, not from any insane desire of conquest or glory. A man, however sensible, must have a heart in his bosom, and a great nation cannot be a piece of selfish clockwork. Suppose you and I are sensible, prudent men, and we see in a crowd one violent fellow unjustly knocking another on the head, we should be brutes, not men, if we did not interfere with the savage; but if we thrust ourselves into a crowd with a large bludgeon, and belabour our neighbours, with the hope that the spectators would cry, 'See what a bold, strong fellow that is!'--then we should be only playing the madman from the motive of the coxcomb. I fear you will find in the military history of the French and English the application of my parable." "Yet still, I confess, there is a gallantry, and a noblemanlike and Norman spirit in the whole French nation, which make me forgive many of their excesses, and think they are destined for great purposes, when experience shall have sobered their hot blood. Some nations, as some men, are slow in arriving at maturity; others seem men in their cradle. The English, thanks to their sturdy Saxon origin, elevated, not depressed, by the Norman infusion, never were children. The difference is striking, when you regard the representatives of both in their great men--whether writers or active citizens." "Yes," said De Montaigne, "in Milton and Cromwell there is nothing of the brilliant child. I cannot say as much for Voltaire or Napoleon. Even Richelieu, the manliest of our statesmen, had so much of the French infant in him as to fancy himself a /beau garcon/, a gallant, a wit, and a poet. As for the Racine school of writers, they were not out of the leading-strings of imitation--cold copyists of a pseudo-classic, in which they saw the form, and never caught the spirit. What so little Roman, Greek, Hebrew, as their Roman, Greek, and Hebrew dramas? Your rude Shakespeare's /Julius Caesar/--even his /Troilus and Cressida/--have the ancient spirit, precisely as they are imitations of nothing ancient. But our Frenchmen copied the giant images of old just as the school-girl copies a drawing, by holding it up to the window, and tracing the lines on silver paper." "But your new writers--De Stael--Chateaubriand?"* * At the time of this conversation the later school, adorned by Victor Hugo, who, with notions of art elaborately wrong, is still a man of extraordinary genius, had not risen into its present equivocal reputation.