is not. His powers in all respects are so stunted
that it takes at least five of his nation to come
up to an average Englishman. Thus, for an
English army of five thousand to attack a French
army of less than twenty-five thousand would be
to take a mean advantage. In religion,
Mounseer is an atheist, and in morals a profligate.
He feeds on kickshaws, and burns with envy
for the roast beef of old England, which he
knows to be at the bottom of British superiority,
but is forbidden by nature ever to attain to.
"Oh, grant to me von littel slice!" cries the
lantern-jawed Gaul in Hogarth's picture of the
Gates of Calais, as he sees the goodly sirloin
steaming past. It is wonderful how vague an
idea we attach to that word "kickshaws," and
yet how positive we are that to kickshaws are
attributable all the defeats of Frenchmen by
Englishmen, from Cressy down to Waterloo. In
Johnson's Dictionary I find a passage quoted
from Fenton, which shows us what was thought
on the subject in the early part of last
century:

Cressy was lost by kickshaws and soup-meagre.

And a better man than Fenton— John Milton—
was equally burly and dictatorial on the levity
and want of substance of our neighbours. "Shall
we," he asks, "need the monsieurs of Paris to
take our youth into their slight custodies, and
send them over back again, transformed into
mimics, apes, and kickshoes?" When the
National Guard came here in the autumn of 1848,
the untravelled Briton was astonished to find
so large a proportion of the men of a fair size
and presence. The truth is, the Frenchman is
rather inclined to fleshiness; yet the soup-
meagre theory still prevails amongst the mass
of Englishmen. Thence is deduced the notion
that Mounseer cannot fight well— that he is
deficient in courage. This was the old mistake
expressed by Garrick in his famous epigram on
Johnson's Dictionary, where he alludes so
scoffingly to the French Academy Dictionary of
Forty:

Talk of war with a Briton, he'll boldly advance,
That one English soldier will beat ten of France;

And Johnson, well arm'd, like a hero of yore,
Has beat forty French, and will beat forty more.

Until recently we had a very similar notion of
the Italians. They were a nation of fiddlers and
singers, only fit to supply the opera-houses of
Europe with musicians, and to be bastinadoed at
home. When Mrs.Thrale married Piozzi, Johnson
plainly told his old friend that she had disgraced
herself by contracting an alliance with a
"fiddler;" to which wretched remonstrance the lady
replied in a letter at once so stinging and respectful,
that, with all his defensive pride, the doctor,
one would think, must needs have winced. At
a later period, the ideal figure of an Italian was
that of a cloaked assassin, or of a villanously
picturesque brigand. We have discovered during
the last few years—or rather the Italians have
themselves made manifest to us—that the land
of Dante is a land of soldiers, of statesmen, and
of patriots; of political virtue which the oppression
of ages has not sufficed to destroy; and of
a people combining the utmost fervour of devotion
to abstract principles, with a degree of self-
restraint rarely broken even in the crises of
revolutionary fever.

While we are revising these matters, we
may as well extend the inquiry into other
countries. Is it true that all Dutchmen are
shaped like humming-tops, are perpetually half-
asleep over their pipes, and seldom indulge in
any further amenities of conversation than can
be conveyed in the monosyllable "Ya"?— that
Germans are always dirty; that the Swiss are
invariably simple mountaineers; that the Spanish
peasant and peasantess are chiefly employed in
dancing the fandango—the former in pink silk
stockings, and the latter in a dress of yellow
and black, like a delightful wasp; that the
Americans are the fastest people in the world,
and the Turks the slowest? Let us have a
commission to settle these matters; let us
deliver ourselves from the despotism of the
Grand Tour. There was once an amiable and
philosophic Frenchman who put on the title-
page of his French and English Dictionary
this admirable motto: "We shall cease to
hate one another when we all understand one
another."

THE MODERN ALCHEMIST.

WAS he right who speculated of the alchemists
of old, that under the search for the
philosopher's stone they sought to pierce through
mysteries that veil the truth as it is in man—
that, in short, the whole subject of alchemy is
man? Said the Arabian Alipili, "O man, that
which thou seekest, find within thee." Said
the great adept Sandovigius, "Man contains
mysteries which the philosophers, using the
light of nature, see as in a mirror." Said the
great Artephius, who assures us that he wrote
at the age of one thousand and twenty-five his
tractate upon the Prolongation of Life, in the
philosopher's stone is contained every secret.
"Decoct, therefore, continually," said he, "for
except the bodies be broken and destroyed,
imbibed and made subtle and fine, thriftily and
diligently managed till they are abstracted from
or lose their grossness, all our labour will be
vain."

"I have lived," said Artephius, "one
thousand and twenty-five years." It is seven
hundred years since he said that, but the grave of
Artephius, where is it?

Can it be that he still decocts continually?
Have I lost my wits in study of your secret book,
O master of the innermost of man? Was it
true, or did it only seem to me, that at the
ninth hour of the ninth day of the month Nine,
or November, the book rose as I read in it, the
parchment cover of my Artephius softened, and
spread into the fresh skin of the philosopher
himself.