Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II A CONTRAST OF ENGLISH AND FRENCH SOCIETY § i. French Society in 1763 In the eyes of the French Society of the early part of the century, England was in a state of barbarism, lacking in taste, and wanting in polish. The two events in English history with which it was best acquainted—the execution of Charles I and the expulsion of James II—did not tend to eradicate this conception. The enthusiasm of Montesquieu for the English constitution, Voltaire's Letters on the English, and the growing taste of our leisured classes for Continental travel, had more or less dispelled the idea, but it vanished slowly. The French who visited Walpole's Gothic enormity at Strawberry Hill regarded it as " natural enough in a nation which had not yet arrived at true taste." 1 Stories 2 are told which would suggest that the less worldly members of French Society still retained a somewhat crude conception of English civilisation. Grosley, whose Tour to London was published in 1771, wrote, " I expected to find at London a people as sanguinary as ready to engage in quarrels; a people whose love of carnage equalled their pride and insolence; a people amongst whom tranquillity and security could not be established. ... I was mistaken." 3 A writer in The London Chronicle of 1766 ascribed the French civility and complaisance to their vanity—the desire toimpress the neighbouring barbarians with their superior politeness. Certainly the life of the salons was one which necessarily inculcated the virtues of courtesy and obedience to rigid etiquette, while the gay and natural conversation on trivial and literary subjects that enlivened the supper-tables of Parisian hostesses induced an ease of manner that was unknown elsewhere. The existence of this polished Society in Paris must apparently be asc...