After receiving and acknowledging these politenesses, the French captain takes his charge on board, and the first thing we afterwards hear of him is the determination “qu’il a su faire passer” into all his crew, to sink rather than yield up the body of the Emperor aux mains de l’etranger—­into the hands of the foreigner.  My dear Monseigneur, is not this par trop fort?  Suppose “the foreigner” had wanted the coffin, could he not have kept it?  Why show this uncalled-for valor, this extraordinary alacrity at sinking?  Sink or blow yourself up as much as you please, but your Royal Highness must see that the genteel thing would have been to wait until you were asked to do so, before you offended good-natured, honest people, who—­heaven help them!—­have never shown themselves at all murderously inclined towards you.  A man knocks up his cabins forsooth, throws his tables and chairs overboard, runs guns into the portholes, and calls le quartier du bord ou existaient ces chambres, Lacedaemon.  Lacedaemon!  There is a province, O Prince, in your royal father’s dominions, a fruitful parent of heroes in its time, which would have given a much better nickname to your quartier du bord:  you should have called it Gascony.

     “Sooner than strike we’ll all ex-pi-er
     On board of the Bell-e Pou-le.”

Such fanfaronading is very well on the part of Tom Dibdin, but a person of your Royal Highness’s “pious and severe dignity” should have been above it.  If you entertained an idea that war was imminent, would it not have been far better to have made your preparations in quiet, and when you found the war rumor blown over, to have said nothing about what you intended to do?  Fie upon such cheap Lacedaemonianism!  There is no poltroon in the world but can brag about what he would have done:  however, to do your Royal Highness’s nation justice, they brag and fight too.

This narrative, my dear Miss Smith, as you will have remarked, is not a simple tale merely, but is accompanied by many moral and pithy remarks which form its chief value, in the writer’s eyes at least, and the above account of the sham Lacedaemon on board the “Belle Poule” has a double-barrelled morality, as I conceive.  Besides justly reprehending the French propensity towards braggadocio, it proves very strongly a point on which I am the only statesman in Europe who has strongly insisted.  In the “Paris Sketch Book” it was stated that the French hate us.  They hate us, my dear, profoundly and desperately, and there never was such a hollow humbug in the world as the French alliance.  Men get a character for patriotism in France merely by hating England.  Directly they go into strong opposition (where, you know, people are always more patriotic than on the ministerial side), they appeal to the people, and have their hold on the people by hating England in common with them.  Why?  It is a long story, and the hatred may be accounted