and language attain the preponderance which once they had.  It is true, that the literature has since lost that advantage.  Germany, the other great centre of the Continent, has now a literature of her own, far more extensive, and better fitted for her peculiar strength and weakness.  But the French language, though also drooping, still holds its ground as the convenient resource of lazy travellers and lazy diplomatists.  This language, acting through that literature, has been the engine for fusing the people of the Continent into a monotonous conformity to one standard of feeling.

In this sense, and with a reference to this deduction, we ascribe unity to the foreign system of manners and social intercourse.  Had every state in Europe been resigned to her own native temper and habits, there could have been no propriety in talking of “foreign” manners, as existing by way of antithesis to English.  There must have been as many varieties of what might be called “foreign,” as there happen to be considerable kingdoms, or considerable territories insulated by strong natural boundaries, or capital cities composing separate jurisdictions for the world of manners, by means of local differences continually ripening into habits.  But this tendency in Europe to break up and subdivide her spirit of manners, was withered and annihilated by the unity of a French taste.  The ambition of a French refinement had so thoroughly seized upon Germany, and even upon the Vandalism of arctic Sweden, by the year 1740, that in the literature of both countries, a ridiculous hybrid dialect prevailed, of which you could not say whether it were a superstructure of Teutonic upon a basis of French, or of French upon a basis of Teutonic.[9] The justification of “foreign,” or “continental,” used as an adequate antithesis to English, is therefore but too complete.

[Footnote 9:  In the days of Gottsched, a German leader about 1740, who was a pedant constitutionally insensible to any real merits of French literature, and yet sharing in the Gallomania, the ordinary tenor of composition was such as this:  (supposing English words substituted for German:) “I demande with entire empressement, your pardon for having tant soit peu meconnu, or at least egare from your orders, autrefois communicated. Faute d’entendre your ultimate but, I now confess, de me trouver perplexed by un mauvais embarras.”—­And so on.]

Having thus explained our use of the word “foreign,” we put it to any considerate man, how it should have been possible that any select tone of society could grow up amongst a body so comprehensive and so miscellaneous as the soi-disant nobility of continental states?  Could it be expected that 130,000 French “nobles” of 1788, needy and squalid in their habits as many of them were, should be high-bred gentlemen?  In Germany, we know that all the watering-places are infested with black-leg gamblers, fortune-hunters, chevaliers