The animosity between the French and English races in Europe, in 1754, almost surpasses our belief. For four centuries, from the days of Edward I. and the black-mailed Prince, who, with their armies, overran France, almost as numerously, and wrought as violently on her pride and taste as the irruptions of green-backed Americans to-day, French and English armies in the field, navies on the sea, wit, caricature, heavy-folioed bombs, light artillery, pasquinades, and exploding mines of sarcasm and raillery, not only mounded new graves on either side the Channel, and gashed ever-reminding physical wounds, but fretted and frayed Saxon self-complacency and Gallic egotism. Cressy, in 1346; Agincourt, in 1415; the battle of the Spurs, in 1513; the war in aid of the Huguenots, in 1627; Blenheim and Malplaquet, in 1706 and 1709,—planted bitter memories that waved continually in vigorous harvests of rancorous hatred. Jealous rivals stood by to remind each of her supposed disgraces, and thus to profit by new quarrels. Commercial competition rubbed salt water into the raw places. Differences of religious faith chafed them with brimstone. Squibs, tossed backwards and forwards, lit on inflamed parts, and raised national sores. Spanish-fly several times drew angry blisters, and proud flesh often set in around the edges. Plasters were of course put on by diplomatic surgeons; but the trouble was deeper than their patches could reach. The knife and steel scissors were then brought in again, and the national vivisections began anew. These surgical operations were almost constantly going on, and their description in Hume, Robertson, and other historians, might be appropriately called Memoirs of Celebrated Cases in Surgery. It must be remembered that, at the period to which we are drawing the reader’s attention, railroads and swift steamers had not yet ironed out the stiff mastiff-like ruffles around the necks of these high-spirited, full-blooded nations. International expositions had not spread their cloths over the Field of Gold, on which rapiers should only be used to cut English roast beef and French pudding, and helmets be turned up into drinking-cups, to quaff, in cool Bordeaux, toasts to the _entente cordial_ of solid peace. On the contrary, at the middle of the eighteenth century the mutual hatred of the two nations saturated everything. National drinks, popular on one side of the twenty-mile strait which parted the imbibers, were poisons on the other. Clothes, worn by one race, were not only shunned, but caricatured with pen and pencil by the other. The paintings, the plastic arts, the literature, and legislation of the period have preserved in enduring forms the widely felt antipathy. Their mutual rancor dissolved the obligations of courtesy, dripped through diplomatic despatches, and left the green mould of jealousy on all the relations of the two governments, and even the business transactions of their people.