As a direct refusal to any request would betray a want of good breeding, every proposal finds their immediate acquiescence; they promise without hesitation, but generally disappoint by the invention of some sly pretence or plausible objection. They have no proper sense of the obligations of truth. So little scrupulous indeed are they with regard to veracity, that they will assert and contradict without blushing, as it may best suit the purpose of the moment. The vanity of an usurped national superiority and a high notion of self-importance never forsake them on any occasion. Those advantages in others which they cannot avoid feeling, they will affect not to see. And although they are reduced to the necessity of employing foreigners to regulate their calendar and keep their clocks in order, although they are in the habit of receiving yearly various specimens of art and ingenuity from Europe, yet they pertinaciously affect to consider all the nations of the earth as barbarians in comparison of themselves. A Chinese merchant of Canton, who, from the frequent opportunities of seeing English ships, was not insensible of their advantages over those of his own nation which traded to Batavia and other distant ports, resolved, and actually began, to construct a vessel according to an English model; but the _Hoo-poo_ or collector of the customs being apprized of it, not only obliged him to relinquish his project but fined him in a heavy penalty for presuming to adopt the modes of a barbarous nation. So great is their national conceit that not a single article imported into the country, as I have elsewhere observed, retains its name. Not a nation, nor person, nor object, that does not receive a Chinese appellation: so that their language, though poor, is pure.