Courage is kept up amongst the common people chiefly by dangers repeatedly incurred in their ordinary avocations. This discipline of experience with boats, horses, bulls, and other dangerous things or creatures, is common both to England and France. In a word, as to the lower classes, they are in the same situation in both countries, except that the humble Frenchman has to undergo military service, which is a fine school, especially in the cavalry and artillery. Young English boyhood, in the middle and higher classes, is in a better situation for acquiring manliness than French boyhood, because it has more liberty. I have not, however, noticed that French boys were timid for themselves (except in talking), it is their parents and teachers who are timid for them. PART VI CUSTOM CHAPTER I CHRONOLOGY [Sidenote: Dissimilarity between French and English.] It is a commonplace that the French and English of to-day are extremely unlike each other--wonderfully unlike each other, considering that they are such near neighbours, and the two principal representatives of western civilisation in Europe. Has the unlikeness always been as marked as it is now, or has there been a time in the past history of the two nations when they resembled each other on some points now marked by trenchant differences? [Sidenote: Varying Degrees of Dissimilarity.] The answer appears to be that the French and English have at certain periods of the past been much less unlike each other than they are now, but yet that the extreme of dissimilarity has been reached at a later period, and that, in the present day, the slow but sure action of causes that may be indicated is bringing about a diminution of that extreme dissimilarity, without, however, giving grounds for any belief or hope that the two nations can ever be very like each other in the future. [Sidenote: A French _Noblesse_ in England.] Recent historians, especially Mr. Freeman, have taught us to realise much more clearly than we did thirty years ago the truth that the kings of the House of Anjou were French kings, and that the governing classes in the England which they ruled were essentially a French _noblesse_. The Frenchifying influence of kings and nobles was resumed in another way by the Stuart dynasty, and might have gone on gradually approximating the entire English nation to French customs, had not a great mental revolution occurred in England and Scotland, which made the British thenceforward a peculiar people, strongly differing not only from the French but from all the other continental nations whatever. The result of that revolution, as it affects our own time, is that England resembles no nation in the world except her own colonies, including, of course, the great kindred nation in America. [Sidenote: Puritanism.] [Sidenote: Its Effect in making the English unlike the French.]