“Never,” said Vincent, “has there been a character more often described--never one less understood. You have been termed superficial. I think, of all people, that you least deserve the accusation. With regard to the few, your philosophers, your mathematicians, your men of science, are consulted by those of other nations, as some of their profoundest authorities. With regard to the many, the charge is still more unfounded. Compare your mob, whether of gentlemen or plebeians, to those of Germany, Italy--even England--and I own, in spite of my national prepossessions, that the comparison is infinitely in your favour. The country gentlemen, the lawyer, the petit maitre of England, are proverbially inane and ill-informed. With you, the classes of society that answer to those respective grades, have much information in literature, and often not a little in science. In like manner, your tradesmen, your mechanics, your servants, are, beyond all measure, of larger, better cultivated, and less prejudiced minds than those ranks in England. The fact is, that all with you pretend to be savans, and this is the chief reason why you have been censured as shallow. We see your fine gentleman, or your petit bourgeois, give himself the airs of a critic or a philosopher; and because he is neither a Scaliger nor a Newton, we forget that he is only the bourgeois or the pelit maitre, and set down all your philosophers and critics with the censure of superficiality, which this shallow individual of a shallow order may justly have deserved. We, the English, it is true, do not expose ourselves thus: our dandies, our tradesmen, do not vent second rate philosophy on the human mind, nor on les beaux arts: but why is this? Not because they are better informed than their correspondent ciphers in France, but because they are much worse; not because they can say a great deal more on the subject, but because they can say nothing at all.” “You do us more than justice,” said Monsieur D’A--, “in this instance: are you disposed to do us justice also in another? It is a favourite propensity of your countrymen to accuse us of heartlessness and want of feeling. Think you that this accusation is deserved?”