Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1876 edition. Excerpt: ... Frenchmen, and Italians, is too generally a mixed product from impudence and insincerity. Want of principle and want of moral sensibility compose the original fundus of southern manners: and the natural product, in a specious hollowness of demeanor, has been afterwards propagated by imitation through innumerable people, who may have partaken less deeply, or not at all, in the original moral qualities that have moulded such a manner. Great faults, therefore, may grow out of great virtues in excess. And this consideration should make us cautious even towards an enemy; much more when approaching so holy a question as the merits of our maternal land. Else, and supposing that a strange nation had been concerned in our judgment, we should declare ourselves mortified and humiliated by three expressions of the British character, too public to havo escaped the notice of Europe. First, we writhe with shame when we hear of semi-delirious lords and ladies, sometimes theatrically costumed in caftans and turbans, proclaiming to the whole world -- as the law if their households -- that all nations and languages Kie free to enter their gates, with one sole exception directed against their British compatriots; that is to say, abjuring by sound of trumpet that land through which only they themselves have risen into consideration; spurning those for countrymen -- ' without whom, ' (as M. Gourville had the boldness to tell Charles II.) without whom, by G-- Sir, you yourself are nothing.' We all know who they are that have done this thing: we may know, if we inquire, how many conceited coxcombs are at this moment acting upon that precedent; in which we scruple not to avow, is containod a fund of satire, more crying than any wnich Juvenal found..."
