I believe that I am but speaking what is agreed on by competent observers, when I say that the essence of the French character is a certain mobility; that is, as it has been defined, a certain ‘excessive sensibility to _present_ impressions,’ which is sometimes ‘levity,’—for it issues in a postponement of seemingly fixed principles to a momentary temptation or a transient whim; sometimes ‘impatience’—as leading to an exaggerated sense of existing evils; often excitement,’—a total absorption in existing emotion; oftener ‘inconsistency’—the sacrifice of old habits to present emergencies; and yet other unfavourable qualities. But it has also its favourable side. The same man who is drawn aside from old principles by small pleasures, who can’t bear pain, who forgets his old friends when he ceases to see them, who is liable in time of excitement to be a one-idea being, with no conception of anything but the one exciting object, yet who nevertheless is apt to have one idea to-day and quite another to-morrow (and this, and more than this, may I fancy be said of the ideal Frenchman) may and will have the subtlest perception of existing niceties, the finest susceptibility to social pleasure, the keenest tact in social politeness, the most consummate skilfulness in the details of action and administration,—may, in short, be the best companion, the neatest man of business, the lightest _homme de salon_, the acutest diplomat of the existing world. It is curious to observe how this reflects itself in their literature. ‘I will believe,’ remarks Montaigne, ‘in anything rather than in any man’s consistency.’ What observer of English habits—what person inwardly conscious of our dull and unsusceptible English nature, would ever say so. Rather in our country obstinacy is the commonest of the vices, and perseverance the cheapest of the virtues. Again, when they attempt history, the principal peculiarity (a few exceptions being allowed for) is an utter incapacity to describe graphically a long-passed state of society. Take, for instance—assuredly no unfavourable example—M. Guizot. His books, I need not say, are nearly unrivalled for eloquence, for philosophy and knowledge; you read there, how in the middle age there were many ‘principles:’ the principle of Legitimacy, the principle of Feudalism, the principle of Democracy; and you come to know how one grew, and another declined, and a third crept slowly on; and the mind is immensely edified, when perhaps at the 315th page a proper name occurs, and you mutter, ‘Dear me, why, if there were not _people_ in the time of Charlemagne! Who would have thought that?’ But in return for this utter incapacity to describe the people of past times, a Frenchman has the gift of perfectly describing the people of his own. No one knows so well—no one can tell so well—the facts of his own life. The French memoirs, the French letters are, and have been, the admiration of Europe. Is not now