they deem these acts of rudeness sufficiently qualified by "Je demande bien de pardons." ["I ask you a thousand pardons."]—­They are fully convinced that the English all eat with their knives, and I have often heard this discussed with much self-complacence by those who usually shared the labours of the repast between a fork and their fingers.  Our custom also of using water-glasses after dinner is an object of particular censure; yet whoever dines at a French table must frequently observe, that many of the guests might benefit by such ablutions, and their napkins always testify that some previous application would be by no means superfluous.  Nothing is more common than to hear physical derangements, disorders, and their remedies, expatiated upon by the parties concerned amidst a room full of people, and that with so much minuteness of description, that a foreigner, without being very fastidious, is on some occasions apt to feel very unpleasant sympathies.  There are scarcely any of the ceremonies of a lady’s toilette more a mystery to one sex than the other, and men and their wives, who scarcely eat at the same table, are in this respect grossly familiar.  The conversation in most societies partakes of this indecency, and the manners of an English female are in danger of becoming contaminated, while she is only endeavouring to suffer without pain the customs of those she has been taught to consider as models of politeness.

Whether you examine the French in their houses or in public, you are every where stricken with the same want of delicacy, propriety, and cleanliness.  The streets are mostly so filthy, that it is perilous to approach the walls.  The insides of the churches are often disgusting, in spite of the advertisements that are placed in them to request the forbearance of phthifical persons:  the service does not prevent those who attend from going to and fro with the same irreverence as if the church were empty; and, in the most solemn part of the mass, a woman is suffered to importune you for a liard, as the price of the chair you sit on.  At the theatres an actor or actress frequently coughs and expectorates on the stage, in a manner one should think highly unpardonable before one’s most intimate friends in England, though this habit is very common to all the French.  The inns abound with filth of every kind, and though the owners of them are generally civil enough, their notions of what is decent are so very different from ours, that an English traveller is not soon reconciled to them.  In short, it would be impossible to enumerate all that in my opinion excludes the French from the character of a well-bred people.—­Swift, who seems to have been gratified by the contemplation of physical impurity, might have done the subject justice; but I confess I am not displeased to feel that, after my long and frequent residences in France, I am still unqualified.  So little are these people susceptible of delicacy, propriety, and decency, that they do not even use the words in the sense we do, nor have they any others expressive of the same meaning.