In the arts, while French productions display resource, ingenuity, and
dexterity, they at the same time show a striking want of the sense of
fitness, and are unfinished and flimsy. Such, in the cities of France,
is remarkably the case with whatever regards furniture and decoration,
while the productions of cookery are at once impregnated with filth,
and admirably calculated to conceal it. In the country, again, with a
climate superior to that of England, there is everywhere to be seen open
fields, later harvests, corn full of weeds, and inferior grain. The
difference between French and English taste in dress is very remarkable.
Even when English women take a hint from French contrivances, they
endeavour to be more natural, modest, and classical. As to male dress,
an English gentleman always desires his tailor to avoid the extremes of
fashion; and, as his dress is grave and manly, it is generally followed
throughout Europe. The French use of forks, napkins, &c. really requires
some notice. A French gentleman, in adjusting himself at his coarse deal
table and shabby cloth, does not hesitate to fix a napkin about his
neck, in such a manner as to protect his clothes in front against the
certainty of being bespattered by his mode of eating. An Englishman of
the middle class would be ashamed of such a contrivance; for, without
any particular care, he eats so as not even to stain the damask cloth
with which his mahogany table is covered. The French gentleman is
perpetually wiping his dirty fingers on a napkin spread out before him,
and of which the beauties are not invisible to his neighbours on each
side. The Englishman of the middle class requires no napkin, because his
fingers are never soiled. The French gentleman, incapable of raising
his left hand properly to his mouth, first hastily hacks his meat into
fragments, then throws down his dirty knife on the cloth, and seizing
the fork in his right hand, while his left fixes a mass of bread on his
plate, he runs up each fragment against it, and having eaten these, he
wipes up his plate with the bread and swallows it. An English peasant
would blush at such bestiality. A French gentleman not only washes his
filthy hands at table, but, after gulping a mouthful, and using it as a
gargle, squirts it into the basin standing before him, and the company,
who may see the charybdis or maelstrom he has made in it, and the
floating filth he has discharged, and which is now whirling in its
vortex. In England this practice is unknown, except to those whose taste
and stomach are too strong for offence. It has been stupidly borrowed
from the Oriental nations, who use no knives and forks, and where,
though it has this apology, it has always excited the disgust of
enlightened travellers. When dinner is over, the Englishman's carpet
is as clean as before; the Frenchman's bare boards resemble those of a
hog-sty. In short, in all that regards the table, the French are some
centuries behind the English.--_Blackwood's Magazine._
* * * * *
In the last _Quarterly Review_ we find that "the safety of the British
empire is now entrusted to 130,000 men. Now France, we believe,
maintains about 200,000 soldiers. The forces of Austria and Prussia have
always been on a much higher footing than ours. Even the late King of
Bavaria kept, we know not how, 70,000 men under arms. Indeed Old England
is by nothing more happily distinguished from her neighbours than by the
silence of the trumpet and drum. At this moment, moreover, the due level
of our peace establishment is but an object of speculative research. No
man who looks to the placing of Roumelia, or whose vision reaches even
to the palace of Elysée Bourbon, would consent that this country should
lose the aid of a single right."
* * * * *