pride and pleasure in the use of his own muscles and his own wits. There are still, happily, Englishmen who would rather steer a cutter across the Channel in rough weather than be shot through a long hole in the chalk. What the railway is to physical motion, settled conventions are to the movements of the mind. Convention is a contrivance for facilitating what we write or speak by which we are relieved from personal effort and almost absolved from personal responsibility. There are men whose whole art of living consists in passing from one conventionalism to another as a traveller changes his train. Such men may be envied for the skill with which they avoid the difficulties of life. They take their religion, their politics, their education, their social and literary opinions, all as provided by the brains of others, and they glide through existence with a minimum of personal exertion. For those who are satisfied with easy, conventional ways the desire for intellectual independence is unintelligible. What is the need of it? Why go, mentally, on a bicycle or in a canoe by your own toilsome exertions when you may sit so very comfortably in the train, a rug round your lazy legs and your softly capped head in a corner? The French ideal of "good form" is to be undistinguishable from others; by which it is not understood that you are to be undistinguishable from the multitude of poor people, but one of the smaller crowd of rich and fashionable people. Independence and originality are so little esteemed in what is called "good society" in France that the adjectives "_indépendant_" and "_original_" are constantly used in a bad sense. "_Il est très indépendant_" often means that the man is of a rude, insubordinate, rebellious temper, unfitting him for social life. "_Il est original_," or more contemptuously, "_C'est un original_," means that the subject of the criticism has views of his own which are not the fashionable views, and which therefore (whatever may be their accuracy) are proper objects of well-bred ridicule. I cannot imagine any state of feeling more destructive of all interest in human intercourse than this, for if on going into society I am only to hear the fashionable opinions and sentiments, what is the gain to me who know them too well already? I could even repeat them quite accurately with the proper conventional tone, so why put myself to inconvenience to hear that dull and wearisome play acted over again? The only possible explanation of the pleasure that French people of some rank appear to take in hearing things, which are as stale as they are inaccurate, repeated by every one they know, is that the repetition of them appears to be one of the signs of gentility, and to give alike to those who utter them and to those who hear, the profound satisfaction of feeling that they are present at the mysterious rites of Caste.