LETTER XLVIII. TO M. DUMONT.-On English Liberty; LETTER XLIX. TO M. ALBIN HOSTALIER.-Language of LETTER L. TO M. ST. CLAIR.-English Barristers; M. Cottu's Enthusiasm in their favour; Inns of Court; Courts LETTER LI. TO M. F. BLAIN.-The Three Schools of LETTER LII. TO M. MIGNET.-Sir J. Mackintosh and Burke; Charles Nodier's Napoleon; Peltier's Trial ........ 396 To you my dear friend, I am bound to address those of my letters in which, treating of the traveller rather than the travels, I shall most particularly detail the history of my impressions, and in some measure forget the public, to claim the ever ready indulgence of friendship. You have accustomed me to think aloud with you, if I may use the expression, and in writing to you I shall feel somewhat relieved from the constraint which the title of author necessarily imposes. I shall be more myself when I can thus venture to speak with unrestrained freedom. We shall quit Calais in two hours, and in four we may perhaps be at Dover. This thought, so gratifying to my impatient curiosity, would, at times, almost render me melancholy, were it not for the reflection that I shall return to France in six months. I can very well conceive the miseries of exile. We alighted at Dessin's Hotel, which Sterne has celebrated, and where he made his original classification of the different kinds of travellers. Do not suppose that, like him, I choose to rank myself in the category of sentimental travellers. There appears to me so much affectation in Sterne's sensibility, that I cannot think of taking him for my model, though his capricious imagination and his originality occasionally amuse me.* This morning, at breakfast, when we were bidding adieu to French wines, we spoke of Sterne's adventures at Calais, and his drinking the king's health, just after being on the point of abusing his majesty, in a fit of indignation at the droit d'aubaine. I did not, like a good christian, follow his example, when I considered that I was about to embark in a fit of spleen not less violent than his; though I trust neither the king nor the law occasioned * The reader who may have recently perused the history of Lefevre, and the journey of the Abbess des Andouillets, will probably be inclined to dispute the justice of this opinion. There is, however, one powerful argument against the real sensibility of Sterne-he lived and died without a friend; and though he has admirably painted the madness of Maria, he did so after having himself broken the heart of the woman who thought herself beloved by him for the space of five years. me to be delayed fifteen days in waiting for my passport. There is, indeed, something so vile in the petty tyranny of our police, that one cannot willingly drink the health of even the best of our inquisitors. At all events I should have been very careful not to propose such a toast to the English family, with whom we set out from Paris, and who, in the diligence, forced us to confess, after a comparison between France and England, that the latter at least possessed the two-fold advantage of having neither wolves nor gensd'armes. In the diligence, I commenced my first lessons in English conversation, being convinced of the necessity of familiarizing my ear to the sounds of a language, which I had hitherto learned only from books. Our travelling companions, a respectable gentleman and his sister, very politely took the trouble to repeat to me certain words with which I thought myself unacquainted, because I now, for the first time, heard their true pronunciation. But I am, above all, indebted to the confidence of the friend, who placed under my safeguard the young lady whom you saw enter the coach with me. 'Tis pleasing to be school'd in a strange tongue By female lips and eyes. I could not help applying to myself these lines of Byron, but without concluding the stanza; for Miss Hester's blue eyes are full of candour and intelligence, and her expressive smile, which so well interprets what she is about to utter, has all the |