way, and with perfect good-will gave him two or three lusty kicks on the seat of honor.  To resent or to return the compliment in Turkey was quite out of the question.  Our traveller, since he could not otherwise acknowledge this kind of favor, received it with the best grace in the world:  he made one of his most ceremonious bows, and begged the kicking Mussulman “to accept his perfect assurances of high consideration.”  Our countryman was too wise to imitate Othello in the use of the dagger.  He thought it better, as better it was, to assuage his bruised dignity with half a yard square of balmy diplomatic diachylon.  In the disasters of their friends, people are seldom wanting in a laudable patience.  When they are such as do not threaten to end fatally, they become even matter of pleasantry.  The English fellow-travellers of our sufferer, finding him a little out of spirits, entreated him not to take so slight a business so very seriously.  They told him it was the custom of the country; that every country had its customs; that the Turkish manners were a little rough, but that in the main the Turks were a good-natured people; that what would have been a deadly affront anywhere else was only a little freedom there:  in short, they told him to think no more of the matter, and to try his fortune in another promenade.  But the squire, though a little clownish, had some home-bred sense.  “What! have I come, at all this expense and trouble, all the way to Constantinople only to be kicked?  Without going beyond my own stable, my groom, for half a crown, would have kicked me to my heart’s content.  I don’t mean to stay in Constantinople eight-and-forty hours, nor ever to return to this rough, good-natured people, that have their own customs.”

In my opinion the squire was in the right.  He was satisfied with his first ramble and his first injuries.  But reason of state and common sense are two things.  If it were not for this difference, it might not appear of absolute necessity, after having received a certain quantity of buffetings by advance, that we should send a peer of the realm to the scum of the earth to collect the debt to the last farthing, and to receive, with infinite aggravation, the same scorns which had been paid to our supplication through a commoner:  but it was proper, I suppose, that the whole of our country, in all its orders, should have a share of the indignity, and, as in reason, that the higher orders should touch the larger proportion.

This business was not ended because our dignity was wounded, or because our patience was worn out with contumely and scorn.  We had not disgorged one particle of the nauseous doses with which we were so liberally crammed by the mountebanks of Paris in order to drug and diet us into perfect tameness.  No,—­we waited till the morbid strength of our boulimia for their physic had exhausted the well-stored dispensary of their empiricism.  It is impossible to guess at the term to which our forbearance would have extended.  The Regicides were more fatigued with giving blows than the callous cheek of British diplomacy was hurt in receiving them.  They had no way left for getting rid of this mendicant perseverance, but by sending for the beadle, and forcibly driving our embassy “of shreds and patches,” with all its mumping cant, from the inhospitable door of Cannibal Castle,—­