It may seem strange that under such circumstances our unhappy neighbours across the Channel should so especially have taken up his public action. He was no deep student of the French tongue, and he had but a trifling acquaintance with the habits of the common people of that country; but he has said himself with great fervour, in his “Thoughts on Political Obligations,” that no man could be a good citizen of England who did not understand her international position. “What” (he would frequently exclaim) “what can they know of England, who only England know?”[78] He did not pretend to a familiarity with the minute details of foreign policy, nor was he such a pedant as to be offended at the good-humoured chaff directed against his accent in the pronunciation of foreign names. Nevertheless he thought it--and rightly thought it--part of his duty to bring into any discussion of the affairs of the Republic those chance phrases which lend colour and body to a conversation. He found this duty as it lay in his path and accomplished it, without bombast, but with full determination, and with a vast firmness of purpose. Thus he would often let drop such expressions as “état majeur,” “la cléricalisme c’est l’ennemi,” “l’état c’est moi,”[79] and such was his painful and exact research that he first in the University arrived at the meaning of the word “bordereau,” which, until his discovery, all had imagined to be a secret material of peculiar complexity. Mr. Lambkin had but one close friend in France, a man who had from cosmopolitan experience acquired a breadth and humour which the Frenchman so conspicuously lacks; he united, therefore, the charm of the French character to that general experience which Lambkin invariably demanded of his friends, and the fact that he belonged to a small political minority and had so long associated with foreigners had winnowed from that fine soul the grossness and one-sidedness, the mingled vanity and ferocity, which seems so fatal a part of the Gallic temper. In some ways this friend reminded one of the great Huguenots whom France to her eternal loss banished by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and of whom a bare twenty thousand are now to be found in the town of Nîmes. In other ways this gifted mind recalled--and this would be in his moments of just indignation--the manner and appearance of a Major Prophet.