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Updated: May 3, 2025
This hard-headed humorist, whose strange conceits, drollery, and bon-hommie, diverted the young patricians, whilst the rumor of his sayings and quibbles gets abroad every day, turns out, in a sequel, to have a probity as invincible as his logic and to be either insane, or, at least, under cover of this play, enthusiastic in his religion.
What were his gifts in this way, I am, alas, most deplorably ignorant of; it was not, heaven knows, that he possessed any conversational talent of successful flattery he knew as much as a negro does of the national debt and yet the "bon-hommie" of his character seemed to tell at once; and I never knew him fail in any one instance to establish an interest for himself before he had completed the ordinary period of a visit.
Everything that ever was amiable and engaging in the character of the French people; the elegance and bon-hommie of their manners, which served as a passport to the French in every country in Europe, and softened the feelings of national resentment with which their ambition and their arrogance to other nations had taught many to regard them as a people; their well-known superiority to other nations in those circumstances, which render them agreeable and pleasant in society, in their constant attention and accommodation to the wishes and pursuits of others, in that anxiety to please, to entertain, and to promote the interests and happiness of others, which costs so little to those who are never subject to that unhappy irregularity of temper and spirit, so visible to all foreigners in the character of the English people, and which never fails to secure esteem, and to interest the affections, while superior worth, less happily gifted for the common purposes and intercourse of life, may be regarded with no warmer feeling than that of distant respect; the loyauté and frankness once so closely associated with the history and character of the French people; the manliness which taught them at once to admit and to repair the wrongs which their impetuosity of spirit, or their harshness of feeling, might have occasioned, and the gallantry with which they were wont to defend with their sword what their honour bound them to maintain; and above all, that delightful and touching abandon of feeling, which seemed the result of genuine simplicity, and which appeared to know no reserve, only because it knew no guilt; all these beautiful and interesting traits, which adorned the character of former and of later days, are still preserved in the comedies of their greater writers; the purity of former character seems to animate the pages which they write, and the spirit of earlier times seems yet to retain its ascendancy, when they wish to pourtray the manners of the present day.
What were his gifts in this way, I am, alas, most deplorably ignorant of; it was not, heaven knows, that he possessed any conversational talent of successful flattery he knew as much as a negro does of the national debt and yet the "bon-hommie" of his character seemed to tell at once; and I never knew him fail in any one instance to establish an interest for himself before he had completed the ordinary period of a visit.
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