510 ENGLAND AND HEli CRITICS. 



partial pencil, whether of the two conform the most to manly decency 

 and reason. The labouring classes of society in every country are 

 infected with objectionable habits ; but though we are not disposed 

 to justify the imperfections of our own, allow us to remind the Count 

 of the disgusting exhibitions he may momentarily witness in the 

 streets of Paris, and of every city nearly in the empire of the French. 

 We will ask the Count if ever he beheld in London, or any English 

 town, examples of such foul indecency as shock the eyes of cleanliness 

 and delicacy in every corner, under every porch, beneath the porticos 

 of churches, in the front of every palace, in the sunshine of the open 

 streets in the refined metropolis of Paris ? His candid answer must 

 declare, that such an outrage as it is on modesty, and even morals, 

 palpably outweighs the rougher usages of our uncultivated classes, 

 were they even fifty times more numerous than prejudice can make 

 them, or the finical torn-foolery of foreign dancing-masters, in their 

 pseudo tenderness, can possibly enumerate. Hear my lord : 



" Les plaisirs vertueux ont-ils pour toi du prix ? 

 Fuis ; que trouver ici ? De 1'impure Cypris 

 Le culte repandu du palais jusqu'au chaume." 



Here, again, we have an imputation so emphatically belied by the 

 moral feeling of our country, that it suffices to distinguish this as one 

 of the many instances in which the Count Achilles substitutes the ex- 

 ception for the rule; and, certainly, the invective comes with most 

 superlative consistency from one who, founding his abuse of England 

 on the comparative merits of his own pure country, may remember 

 that, in the zenith of that slavish glory which the learned and the 

 brave of France unanimously boasted and upheld beneath the prodi- 



fal and pompous domination of the Grand Louis, the destinies of that 

 ne country, of those noble warriors and immortal wits who bore a 

 reign of such abuse and filthy libertinism, were swayed alternately by 

 a strumpet, bigotted yet sensual, and a despotising monk, combining 

 their insidious influence, and reciprocating its effects for ends of 

 selfishness and superstition, for rapacity and persecution. Here was, 

 indeed, an instance of the 



" Culte de 1'impure Cypris," 



which well, in such an age of servile flattery and imitation, might 

 affect the nation " from the cottage to the throne !" Here was, indeed, 

 an instance of a king so openly defying decency, so glaringly con- 

 temptuous of the nation, which he nominally ruled at a period, too, 

 illustrious for the splendour of its arts, its arms, its heroism, and its 

 bigotry that, after vitally corrupting his admiring subjects by the 

 scandal of his court and the foulness of his own example, he dared to 

 nominate, as their succeeding masters, the fruits of his notorious 

 lubricity. And here we take the infamous example of the fourteenth 

 Louis, of the Grand Monarque, not because the first or last in the 

 series of such execrable instances, but because the fulsome pens of 

 flattery the pens of orators, philosopers, of priests and poets have 

 meanly eulogized a prince and system of such ineffable disgrace. Let 

 the Count Achilles look to the disgusting debaucheries of the court 



