514 ENGLAND AND HER CRITICS. 



saith the Count. How many hath he, marry ? Whatever be the case, 

 as touching the numerical effect of Count de Jouffroy's retinue, we 

 surmise, at least, a patriot of his exalted mind would soon eject, by 

 peremptory process, any servant in his suite who dared to sport an 

 English broadcloth in the room of that incessant piece of sky-blue 

 patchwork, which flaps and flies, and barely holds together, on the 

 backs of all the happy peasantry in revolutionary France. His lord- 

 ship, in the natural sequence of absurdities, proceeds to eulogize the 

 indolence and beggary of Italy and Spain ; expatiates on a lyre cham- 

 petre, shepherds, beech-trees, and the childish common-place of 

 cocknified bucolics. He ends his little spurt (for such it is) of cant 

 and squeamishness, by telling us, 



" Nicette, en secret, la rougeur ail visage 

 Lui confie un ruban pour le prochain village," 



when the enviable beggar, who has edified the patriarchal society 

 depicted by the Count with much incomparable drollery by a dis- 

 sertation upon simples, husbandry, and silk- worms, prosecutes his 

 mendicant career to share the riches of his wallet with less successful 

 vagrants than himself: 



" Car le plaisir du pauvre est d'etre genereux." 



" Like to the Pontick sea, 



Whose icy current and compulsive course 

 Ne'er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due on," 



the noble satirist proceeds to show the blessing of mendicity, the 

 comforts of monastic sepulture, and benediction. He apostrophizes 

 the " miserable Breton," informs him that he has to contest with 

 swine, the offal which they feed on (potatoes), and that their sus- 

 tenance is eventually derived from brewers' grains ; forbids him to 

 solicit aid from opulence, and directs him, with remarkable precision, 

 to a pawnbroker's shop, where the last rags of his wife may possibly 

 suffice to lengthen one more day the miserable being of his children. 



But, as perhaps the patience of our readers is not of so elastic a cha- 

 racter as Count Achille de Jouffroy's imbecility, we shall bring our 

 observations to a close ; alluding merely to the noble censor's notice 

 of the late atrocities of Burke, and others of the same nefarious class, 

 and of the system of supply which formerly obtained in London for 

 the subjects of anatomical professors ; which two systems, the Count 

 Achilles takes to be infallibly an index to the English character ! We 

 smile; as well we may. What would any of those intellectual, humane, 

 and worthy men, who now adorn the soil of France, imagine of the taste 

 and motives of an English nobleman who took a simple tithe of those 

 enormous crimes which blot the heinous annals of their Revolution ; 

 and having given a faithful picture of those unprecedented outrages 

 on all the laws of heaven aud man, denoted it a character of the 

 civilized and intellectual inhabitants of Christian France ? 



If we condescended to pursue the Count with ridicule, we could 

 have him on a thousand vulnerable points of national autonomy ; and 

 though we candidly admit that an acute antagonist, though not 

 Achilles, might favour us with pretty smart retaliation, we believe the 



