This apprehension—­happily unfounded—­was very insular and very English.  National traits are, as a matter of fact, as enduring as the mountain-tops.  They survive all change of policies, all shifting of boundary lines, all expansion and contraction of dominion.  When Froissart tranquilly observed, “The English are affable to no other nation than themselves,” he spoke for the centuries to come.  Sorbieres, who visited England in 1663, who loved the English turf, hated and feared the English cooking, and deeply admired his hospitable English hosts, admitted that the nation had “a propensity to scorn all the rest of the world.”  The famous verdict, “Les Anglais sont justes, mais pas bons,” crystallizes the judgment of time.  Foreign opinion is necessarily an imperfect diagnosis, but it has its value to the open mind.  He is a wise man who heeds it, and a dull man who holds it in derision.  When an English writer in “Macmillan” remarks with airy contempt that French criticisms on England have “all the piquancy of a woman’s criticisms on a man,” the American—­standing outside the ring—­is amused by this superb simplicity of self-conceit.

Fear of a French invasion and the carefully nurtured detestation of the Papacy,—­these two controlling influences must be held responsible for prejudices too deep to be fathomed, too strong to be overcome.  “We do naturally hate the French,” observes Mr. Pepys, with genial candour; and this ordinary, everyday prejudice darkened into fury when Napoleon’s conquests menaced the world.  Our school histories have taught us (it is the happy privilege of a school history to teach us many things which make no impression on our minds) that for ten years England apprehended a descent upon her shores; but we cannot realize what the apprehension meant, how it ate its way into the hearts of men, until we stumble upon some such paragraph as this, from a letter of Lord Jeffrey’s, written to Francis Horner in the winter of 1808:  “For my honest impression is that Bonaparte will be in Dublin in about fifteen months, perhaps.  And then, if I survive, I shall try to go to America.”

“If I survive!” What wonder that Jeffrey, who was a clear-headed, unimaginative man, cherished all his life a cold hostility to France?  What wonder that the painter Haydon, who was highly imaginative and not in the least clear-headed, felt such hostility to be an essential part of patriotism?  “In my day,” he writes in his journal, “boys were born, nursed, and grew up, hating and to hate the name of Frenchman.”  He did hate it with all his heart, but then his earliest recollection—­when he was but four years old—­was seeing his mother lying on her sofa and crying bitterly.  He crept up to her, puzzled and frightened, poor baby, and she sobbed out:  “They have cut off the Queen of France’s head, my dear.”  Such an ineffaceable recollection colours childhood and sets character.  It is an education for life.