The Crayon Papers

his walls, and spring guns and man-traps in his gardens; shrouds himself with trees and window-curtains; exults in his quiet and privacy, and seems disposed to keep out noise, daylight, and company. His house, like himself, has a reserved, inhospitable exterior; yet whoever gains admittance is apt to find a warm heart and warm fireside within.
    The French excel in wit, the English in humor; the French have gayer fancy, the English richer imagination. The former are full of sensibility; easily moved, and prone to sudden and great excitement; but their excitement is not durable; the English are more phlegmatic; not so readily affected, but capable of being aroused to great enthusiasm. The faults of these opposite temperaments are that the vivacity of the French is apt to sparkle up and be frothy, the gravity of the English to settle down and grow muddy. When the two characters can be fixed in a medium, the French kept from effervescence and the English from stagnation, both will be found excellent.
    This contrast of character may also be noticed in the great concerns of the two nations. The ardent Frenchman is all for military renown; he fights for glory, that is to say, for success in arms. For, provided the national flag is victorious, he cares little about the expense, the injustice, or the inutility of the war. It is wonderful how the poorest Frenchman will revel on a triumphant bulletin; a great victory is meat and drink to him; and at the sight of a military sovereign, bringing home captured cannon and captured standards, he throws up his greasy cap in the air, and is ready to jump out of his wooden shoes for joy.
    John Bull, on the contrary, is a reasoning, considerate person. If he does wrong, it is in the most rational way imaginable. He fights because the good of the world requires it. He is a moral person, and makes war upon his neighbor for the maintenance of peace and good order, and sound principles. He is a money-making personage, and fights for the prosperity of commerce and manufactures. Thus the two nations have been fighting, time out of mind, for glory and good. The French, in pursuit of glory, have had their capital twice taken; and John, in pursuit of good, has run himself over head and ears in debt.
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THE TUILERIES AND WINDSOR CASTLE
    I have sometimes fancied I could discover national characteristics in national edifices. In the Chateau of the Tuileries, for instance, I perceive the same jumble of contrarieties that marks the French character; the same whimsical mixture of the great and the little; the splendid and the paltry, the sublime and the grotesque. On visiting this famous pile, the first thing that strikes both eye and ear is military display. The courts glitter with steel-clad soldiery, and resound with the tramp of horse, the roll of drum, and the bray of trumpet. Dismounted guardsmen patrol its arcades, with loaded carbines, jingling spears, and clanking sabers. Gigantic grenadiers are posted about its staircases; young officers of the guards loll from the balconies, or lounge in groups upon the terraces; and the gleam of bayonet from window to window, shows that sentinels are pacing up and down the corridors and antechambers. The first floor is brilliant with the splendors of a court. French taste has tasked itself in adorning the sumptuous suites of apartments; nor are the gilded chapel and the splendid theater forgotten, where piety and pleasure are next-door neighbors, and harmonize together with perfect French bienseance .
    Mingled up with all this regal and military magnificence is a world of whimsical and make-shift detail. A great part of the huge edifice is cut up into little chambers and nestling-places for retainers of the court, dependents on retainers, and hangers-on of dependents. Some are squeezed into narrow entre-sols, those low, dark, intermediate slices of apartments between floors, the inhabitants of which seem shoved in edgewise, like books between narrow shelves; others are perched like swallows, under the eaves; the high roofs, too, which are as tall and steep as a French cocked hat, have rows of little dormant windows, tier above tier, just large enough to admit light and air for some dormitory, and to enable its occupant to peep out at the sky. Even to the very ridge of the roof may be seen here and there one of these air-holes, with a stove pipe beside it, to carry off the smoke from the handful of fuel with which its weazen-faced tenant simmers his