The period of 1830 was a time when the most eminent authors of France were very much on their guard against any excess in the matter of patriotism. The newly aroused appreciation of the merits of foreign literatures led, by a natural reaction, to contempt for their own and its classic authors, and even at times for the French spirit generally. The first, tolerably foolish, attack made by the Romantic School on Racine is a well-known episode. French classic literature was declared to be a literature only suitable for the schoolroom. Victor Hugo, who was by no means generally lacking in national pride, exclaimed, in the preface to _Les Orientales_: "Other nations say, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare. We say, Boileau." Hugo's youth had been spent in Spain, and he treated Spanish themes in his first dramas (_Inez de Castro, Hernani_), retaining the Spanish division of the play into days instead of acts. Spain and Italy were the Promised Land of the budding Romanticists. Alfred de Musset wrote _Contes d'Espagne et d'Italie_; Théophile Gautier never wearied of showering maledictions on the cold climate and colourless customs of France, called Spain his true fatherland, &c., &c. Beyle and Mérimée both exemplify in a very marked degree this protest against national vanity. In Beyle's mouth the word "French" was almost a term of contumely; his satirical appellation for Frenchmen was _les vainvifs_; his books teem with such ejaculations as: "Could anything be more comical than to ascribe depth of character to a Parisian?" He calls his country, "le plus vilain pays du monde, que les nigauds appellent la belle France." We have seen that he eventually renounced his nationality. Mérimée, who was almost as much in love with Spanish as Beyle with Italian customs, had the essentially Romantic leaning to the foreign, the exotic; and he too, like his older friend, considered one of the leading traits of French national character to be that constant attention to the opinion of others (_le qu'en dira-t-on_) which destroys all originality, makes a joyless thing of life, and forms the best foundation for the hypocrisies of society. His general opinion of his countrymen was a tolerably low one, and he took no pains to conceal the fact from them. But, unlike Beyle, he in the end proclaimed his allegiance to the old gospel, the old creed, of patriotism. The step was not an easy one for a man who hated patriotic phrase-mongering like the plague; it took nothing less than the downfall of France to draw any expression of love for his country from his lips. But in a letter dated September 13, 1870, he writes: "All my life long I have endeavoured to keep free from prejudices, and to be a cosmopolitan rather than a Frenchman; but all these philosophic draperies are of no avail. I bleed to-day from these stupid Frenchmen's wounds, I weep for their humiliations, and, ungrateful and foolish as they are, I love them in spite of everything."