He had, however, plenty to distract him.  France was all astir with the Austrian war, and it is impossible to read his expressions of half-awed admiration of French military and other greatness without rather mischievous amusement.  He visited the Morbihan, which struck him as it must strike every one.  Here he is pathetic over a promising but not performing dinner at Auray—­“soup, Carnac oysters, shrimps, fricandeau of veal, breast of veal, and asparagus;” but “everything so detestable” that his dinner was bread and cheese.  He must have been unlucky:  the little Breton inns, at any rate a few years later than this, used, it is true, to be dirty to an extent appalling to an Englishman; but their provender was usually far from contemptible.  There is more sense of Breton scenery in another letter a little later.  Both here and, presently, in Gascony he notes truly enough “the incredible degree to which the Revolution has cleared the feudal ages out of the minds of the country people”; but if he reflected on the bad national effect of this breach with the past, he does not say so.  By June 12 he is in Holland, and does not like it—­weather, language, &c., all English in the worst sense, apparently without the Norman and Latin element which just saves us.  And though he was a very short time in the Netherlands, he has to relieve his feelings by more abuse of them when he gets back to Paris—­in fact, he speaks of Holland exactly as the typical Frenchman speaks of England, and is accordingly very funny to read.  The two things that make Holland most interesting, history and art, were exactly those that appealed to Mr Arnold least.  Then after a refreshing bath of Paris, he goes to Strasbourg, and Time—­Time the Humourist as well as the Avenger and Consoler—­makes him commit himself dreadfully.  He “thinks there cannot be a moment’s doubt” that the French will beat the Prussians even far more completely and rapidly than they are beating the Austrians.  Lord Cowley, it seems, “entirely shared” his conviction that “the French will always beat any number of Germans who come into the field against them, and never be beaten by any one but the English.”  Let us hope that Jove, when he whistled half this prophecy down the wind, affirmed the rest of it!  Switzerland comes next; and he is beginning to want very much to be back in England, partly “for the children, but partly also from affection for that foolish old country”—­which paternal and patriotic desire was granted about the end of the month, though only for a short time, during which he wrote a pamphlet on the Italian question.  Then “M. le Professeur Docteur Arnold, Directeur General de toutes les Ecoles de la Grande Bretagne,” returned to France for a time, saw Merimee and George Sand and Renan, as well as a good deal of Sainte-Beuve, and was back again for good in the foolish old country at the end of the month.