518 My Uncles Diary at Calais. QMAY, 



to a kind of effort to compose his picture of the town ; and the atmos- 

 phere, I doubt not, was intensely keen when he recorded, in the vehe- 

 mence of his disgust, his admirable descant on the despoiling harpies of 

 the custom-house. There is but little commendation mingled with his 

 censures : this may destroy, in some opinions, the verity of his deli- 

 neations ; but true it is he found but little for his eulogy, had his mood 

 directed him to such an enterprize. It must, however, be observed that 

 he was evidently wrong in taking from the town of Calais so mean and 

 rancid a conglomeration of the worst materials of society his sentiments 

 of France in general ; a country teeming with luxuriance and beauty 

 with intellectual and moral excellence indeed exhibiting the noblest 

 qualities of human nature, and all the social virtues and affections which 

 constitute the charm of private life. I must, once for all, admit that 

 many of my uncle's notions were tinctured by his native predilections, 

 by which he formed the standard of propriety in general. He seemed 

 not to have known, before he left the country of his birth, that art and 

 industry had given it a vast pre-eminence above all other nations of the 

 world, and had commonly diffused among the lower classes even of its peo- 

 ple every object of utility and comfort, which in lands of less felicity are 

 merely known by name, and rarely found in the possession of the great 

 and opulent themselves : a fact which, by the way, is worth the notice of 

 the squeamish portion of our countrymen who languish for the indulgence 

 of a few exotic, questionable benefits, forgetful of the numerous or, to 

 speak more justly the innumerable means of comfort, cleanliness, and 

 ease which England, beyond all nations of the earth, profusely places in 

 the reach of every order of her people. These, indeed, were all my 

 uncle's notions ; for he was genuinely English even to his prejudices, 

 which he looked on as the laudable excrescences of the love of country, 

 and which, far from wishing to rescind for their unphilosophical cha- 

 racter, he studiously and fondly trained into expansion, with the highest 

 admiration of their luxuriance. He was a bitter adversary to the conver- 

 sion of native taste into the gout of foreign systems ; it appeared to him 

 a treason against the sovereign law of nature an unfair desertion of 

 legitimate authority, for a capricious acquiescence in the usurpation of 

 an alien sway. Thus he was firm to the rigid decency of English attire : 

 he disdained the monkified assumption of barbarian mustachios, was 

 always well shaven, and wore clean linen white as he could get it, in a 

 town renowned for the worst washing in all Europe. He abhorred the 

 laxity of dress so palpable in most of the expatriated sojourners in Calais. 

 who gradually declined from the propriety of their vernacular attire 

 from coats to jackets, from hats to caps, from good plain linen to party- 

 coloured dirt-concealing cottons j until, by imperceptible degrees, the 

 nicety of English costume had sunk into the slovenly indifference of 

 genuine French uncleanliness. I think it fair to preface the random 

 thoughts of my relation by this admission of his strength of prejudice 

 and prepossession, that the fair deductions of the reader may fix the 

 veritable quota of his observations. 



MY UNCLE'S DIARY. 



April 1. Put into effect my resolution of quitting England. The day 

 was ominous. Landed at Calais. Haifa franc to pay for stepping on a plank. 

 The first object that struck me, the column dedicated to Louis XVIII. 

 -a monument of French perfidy and subservience : the inscription, 



