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How they hate us, these foreigners, in Belgium as much as in France! What lies they tell of us; how gladly they would see us humiliated! Honest folks at home over their port-wine say, “Ay, ay, and very good reason they have too. National vanity, sir, wounded–we have beaten them so often.” My dear sir, there is not a greater error in the world than this. They hate you because you are stupid, hard to please, and intolerably insolent and air-giving. I walked with an Englishman yesterday, who asked the way to a street of which he pronounced the name very badly to a little Flemish boy: the Flemish boy did not answer; and there was my Englishman quite in a rage, shrieking in the child’s ear as if he must answer. He seemed to think that it was the duty of “the snob,” as he called him, to obey the gentleman. This is why we are hated–for pride. In our free country a tradesman, a lackey, or a waiter will submit to almost any given insult from a gentleman: in these benighted lands one man is as good as another; and pray God it may soon be so with us! Of all European people, which is the nation that has the most haughtiness, the strongest prejudices, the greatest reserve, the greatest dulness? I say an Englishman of the genteel classes. An honest groom jokes and hobs-and-nobs and makes his way with the kitchen-maids, for there is good social nature in the man; his master dare not unbend. Look at him, how he scowls at you on your entering an inn-room; think how you scowl yourself to meet his scowl. To-day, as we were walking and staring about the place, a worthy old gentleman in a carriage, seeing a pair of strangers, took off his hat and bowed very gravely with his old powdered head out of the window: I am sorry to say that our first impulse was to burst out laughing–it seemed so supremely ridiculous that a stranger should notice and welcome another.

As for the notion that foreigners hate us because we have beaten them so often, my dear sir, this is the greatest error in the world: well-educated Frenchmen DO NOT BELIEVE THAT WE HAVE BEATEN THEM. A man was once ready to call me out in Paris because I said that we had beaten the French in Spain; and here before me is a French paper, with a London correspondent discoursing about Louis Buonaparte and his jackass expedition to Boulogne. “He was received at Eglintoun, it is true,” says the correspondent, “but what do you think was the reason? Because the English nobility were anxious to revenge upon his person (with some coups de lance) the checks which the ‘grand homme’ his uncle had inflicted on us in Spain.”

This opinion is so general among the French, that they would laugh at you with scornful incredulity if you ventured to assert any other. Foy’s history of the Spanish War does not, unluckily, go far enough. I have read a French history which hardly mentions the war in Spain, and calls the battle of Salamanca a French victory. You know how the other day, and in the teeth of all evidence, the French swore to their victory of Toulouse: and so it is with the rest; and you may set it down as pretty certain, 1st, That only a few people know the real state of things in France, as to the matter in dispute between us; 2nd, That those who do, keep the truth to themselves, and so it is as if it had never been.

These Belgians have caught up, and quite naturally, the French tone. We are perfide Albion with them still. Here is the Ghent paper, which declares that it is beyond a doubt that Louis Napoleon was sent by the English and Lord Palmerston; and though it states in another part of the journal (from English authority) that the Prince had never seen Lord Palmerston, yet the lie will remain uppermost–the people and the editor will believe it to the end of time. . . . See to what a digression yonder little fellow in the tall hat has given rise! Let us make his picture, and have done with him.