On the contrary, I have always admired the degree of magnanimity exhibited by the French on the occupation of their capital by the English. When we consider the military ambition of this nation, its love of glory; the splendid height to which its renown in arms had recently been carried, and with these, the tremendous reverses it had just undergone; its armies shattered, annihilated; its capital captured, garrisoned, and overrun, and that too by its ancient rival, the English, toward whom it had cherished for centuries a jealous and almost religious hostility; could we have wondered if the tiger spirit of this fiery people had broken out in bloody feuds and deadly quarrels; and that they had sought to rid themselves in any way of their invaders? But it is cowardly nations only, those who dare not wield the sword, that revenge themselves with the lurking dagger. There were no assassinations in Paris. The French had fought valiantly, desperately, in the field; but, when valor was no longer of avail, they submitted like gallant men to a fate they could not withstand. Some instances of insult from the populace were experienced by their English visitors; some personal rencontres, which led to duels, did take place; but these smacked of open and honorable hostility. No instances of lurking and perfidious revenge occurred, and the British soldier patroled the streets of Paris safe from treacherous assault. If the English met with harshness and repulse in social intercourse, it was in some degree a proof that the people are more sincere than has been represented. The emigrants who had just returned were not yet reinstated. Society was constituted of those who had flourished under the late regime; the newly ennobled, the recently enriched, who felt their prosperity and their consequence endangered by this change of things. The broken-down officer, who saw his glory tarnished, his fortune ruined, his occupation gone, could not be expected to look with complacency upon the authors of his downfall. The English visitor, flushed with health, and wealth, and victory, could little enter into the feelings of the blighted warrior, scarred with a hundred battles, an exile from the camp, broken in constitution by the wars, impoverished by the peace, and cast back, a needy stranger in the splendid but captured metropolis of his country. "Oh! who can tell what heroes feel, When all but life and honor's lost!"