Among the minor nursery tales with which my mother allowed me to relieve the study of the great nursery tale of Genesis, my favourite was Miss Edgeworth’s “Frank.” The authoress chose this for the boy’s name, because she meant him to be a type of Frankness, or openness of heart:—truth of heart, that is to say, liking to lay itself open. You are in the habit, I believe, some of you, still, of speaking occasionally of English Frankness;—not recognizing, through the hard clink of the letter K, that you are only talking, all the while, of English Frenchness. Still less when you count your cargoes of gold from San Francisco, do you pause to reflect what San means, or what Francis means, without the Co;—or how it came to pass that the power of this mountain town of Assisi, where not only no gold can be dug, but where St. Francis forbade his Company to dig it anywhere else—came to give names to Devil’s towns far across the Atlantic—(and by the way you may note how clumsy the Devil is at christening; for if by chance he gets a fresh York all to himself, he never has any cleverer notion than to call it ‘New York’; and in fact, having no mother-wit from his dam, is obliged very often to put up with the old names which were given by Christians,—Nombre di Dios, Trinidad, Vera Cruz, and the like, even when he has all his own way with everything else in the places, but their names). But to return. You have lately had a fine notion, have you not, of English Liberty as opposed to French Slavery? Well, whatever your English liberties may be, the French knew what the word meant, before you. For France, if you will consider of it, means nothing else than the Country of Franks;—the country of a race so intensely Free that they for evermore gave name to Freedom. The Greeks sometimes got their own way, as a mob; but nobody, meaning to talk of liberty, calls it ‘Greekness.’ The Romans knew better what Libertas meant, and their word for it has become common enough, in that straitened form, on your English tongue; but nobody calls it ‘Romanness.’ But at last comes a nation called the Franks; and they are so inherently free and noble in their natures, that their name becomes the word for the virtue; and when you now want to talk of freedom of heart, you say Frankness, and for the last political privilege which you have it so much in your English minds to get, you haven’t so much as an English word, but must call it by the French one, ‘Franchise.’ [43] “Freedom of heart,” you observe, I say. Not the English freedom of Insolence, according to Mr. B., (see above, Letter 29,) but pure French openness of heart, Fanchette’s and her husband’s frankness, the source of joy, and courtesy, and civility, and passing softness of human meeting of kindly glance with glance. Of which Franchise, in her own spirit Person, here is the picture for you, from the French Romance of the Rose,—a picture which English Chaucer was thankful to copy.