14 The British Embassies, Ambassadors, [[JAN. 



But whatever may be the foreign necessity of looking to the noblesse 

 for Diplomatic functionaries, the necessity has long passed by in the 

 general information and manly ability of the middle orders of England. 

 America had the merit of first proving, that a man might be a Diploma- 

 tist without supporters to his arms; and Franklin, Silas Deane, and 

 Jefferson, managed their business as well as if their coats were covered 

 with orders, or their pedigree dated from some Imperial bastard, or 

 Italian desperado. 



The American system, thus shown to be efficient, should be instantly 

 adopted. The American minister is seldom suspected of doing his 

 country's business ill, though he may not make the most graceful bow 

 at Almack's, and though he gives but few Diplomatic banquets, and 

 perhaps no balls. But his country consoles herself for the humiliation, 

 by recollecting that he costs her but 2,0001. a year. 



As to our offering any offence to foreign courts by substituting plain 

 Mr. A. or B., for my Lord C. or Marquis D., every one who knows 

 what the mind of foreign courts is on the subject, knows the idea to be 

 an absurdity. 



The fact is, that nothing would delight them, one and all, so much, 

 as to see a total change. However we may feel the expenditure, they 

 feel it ten times worse. No foreign court is rich ; scarcely any one 

 among them can more than pay the year ; and they groan in their 

 inmost souls at the idea of the enormous sums wrung from them by the 

 intolerable etiquette of vying with the richest, and certainly the most 

 wasteful, nation of Europe. Nothing would rejoice them more than to 

 see the whole painted and gilded system that plunders them of so many 

 thousands yearly, knocked into fragments ; and, instead of the lounging 

 coxcombs, or worn-down Lord Lumbercourts of the ministerial bench, 

 insolent in proportion to their imbecility, to see a succession of intelligent 

 English gentlemen in plain coats, unceremoniously attending to the 

 concerns of England and her allies. 



The breaking-up of the system would be attended with the most obvious 

 advantages to England. In the first place, its general tendency would be 

 to substitute men who had no claim but their ability, for a race of men 

 who had no claim but their rank. Lords and lordlings would still, of 

 course, be found, glad to get any thing that they could get ; but the great 

 leviathans, the huge wallowers in court patronage, would fall off; the 

 country's purse at home, and character abroad, would be equally 

 relieved ; and for the most incapable genus of public pensioners, we 

 should have able and useful men. 



Another ad vantage would be, the thinning of that minor swarm of at- 

 taches which make the scoff of the English name at every foreign residence, 

 and return to this country only to pervert public habits by foreign vices 

 and foreign foppery. It is from this export of our raw material to return 

 upon our hands fabricated in the foreign pattern, that we have the crowd 

 of miserable coxcombs, whom one meets in every public place, and whose 

 lisping and lounging, whose smatter of broken French and Italian, and 

 whose degrading effeminacy of manner and mind, make them fitter for a 

 coterie of French milliners, than for association with English gentlemen. 

 This is the cigar and moustachio generation that disfigures our streets, 

 and look more like the representatives of a community of baboons, than 

 a portion of rational mankind. 



But, with the silliest exterior of the silliest part of foreign life, they 

 introduce evils of a more revolting nature. The idler of rank abroad has 

 seldom more than two resources for getting rid of the burthen of time 

 gaming and intrigue. The wretched and almost universal corruption of 



