Mr. Caxton (tartly).--"If you mean me by the sage, I was not puzzled at all. Heaven knows you do right to inculcate patience--it is a virtue very much required in your readers. Nevertheless," added my father, softening with the enjoyment of his joke--"nevertheless, Blanche and Helen are quite right. Patience is the courage of the conqueror; it is the virtue, _par excellence_, of Man against Destiny--of the One against the World, and of the Soul against Matter. Therefore this is the courage of the Gospel; and its importance, in a social view--its importance to races and institutions--can not be too earnestly included. What is it that distinguishes the Anglo-Saxon from all other branches of the human family, peoples deserts with his children, and consigns to them the heritage of rising worlds? What but his faculty to brave, to suffer, to endure--the patience that resists firmly, and innovates slowly. Compare him with the Frenchman. The Frenchman has plenty of valor--that there is no denying; but as for fortitude, he has not enough to cover the point of a pin. He is ready to rush out of the world if he is bit by a flea." Captain Roland.--"There was a case in the papers the other day, Austin, of a Frenchman who actually did destroy himself because he was so teased by the little creatures you speak of. He left a paper on his table, saying that 'life was not worth having at the price of such torments.'"[7] [7] Fact. In a work by M. Gibert, a celebrated French physician, on diseases of the skin, he states that that minute troublesome kind of rash, known by the name of _prurigo_, though not dangerous in itself, has often driven the individual afflicted by it to--suicide. I believe that our more varying climate, and our more heating drinks and aliments, render the skin complaint more common in England than in France, yet I doubt if any English physician could state that it had ever driven one of his _English_ patients to suicide. Mr. Caxton (solemnly).--"Sir, their whole political history, since the great meeting of the Tiers État, has been the history of men who would rather go to the devil than be bit by a flea. It is the record of human impatience, that seeks to force time, and expects to grow forests from the spawn of a mushroom. Wherefore, running through all extremes of constitutional experiment, when they are nearest to democracy they are next door to a despot; and all they have really done is to destroy whatever constitutes the foundation of every tolerable government. A constitutional monarchy can not exist without aristocracy, nor a healthful republic endure with corruption of manners. The cry of Equality is incompatible with Civilization, which, of necessity, contrasts poverty with wealth, and, in short, whether it be an emperor or a mob that is to rule, Force is the sole hope of order, and the government is but an army.