“In France you are unpolite unless you solicit a judge or his wife to favour your cause; and you inevitably lose it.  In France there is no want of honour where there is no want of courage; you may lie, but you must not hear that you lie.  I asked him what he thought then of lying; and he replied, —

“‘C’est selon.’

“‘And suppose you should overhear the whisper?’

“‘Ah, parbleu!  Cela m’irrite; cela me pousse au bout.’

“I was going on to remark that a real man of honour could less bear to lie than to hear it; when he cried, at the words real man of honour, —

“‘Le voila, Monsieur! le voila!’ and gave himself such a blow on the breast as convinced me the French are a brave people.

“He told us that nothing but his honour was left him, but that it supplied the place of all he had lost.  It was discovered some time afterward that M. Dubois had been guilty of perjury, had been a spy, and had lost nothing but a dozen or two of tin patty-pans, hereditary in his family, his father having been a cook on his own account.

“William, it is well at thy time of life that thou shouldst know the customs of far countries, particularly if it should be the will of God to place thee in a company of players.  Of all nations in the world, the French best understand the stage.  If thou shouldst ever write for it, which God forbid, copy them very carefully.  Murders on their stage are quite decorous and cleanly.  Few gentlemen and ladies die by violence who would not have died by exhaustion.  ’For they rant and rave until their voice fails them, one after another; and those who do not die of it die consumptive.  They cannot bear to see cruelty; they would rather see any image than their own.’  These are not my observations, but were made by Sir Everard Starkeye, who likewise did remark to Monsieur Dubois, that ’cats, if you hold them up to the looking-glass, will scratch you terribly; and that the same fierce animal, as if proud of its cleanly coat and velvety paw, doth carefully put aside what other animals of more estimation take no trouble to conceal.’

“‘Our people,’ said Sir Everard, ’must see upon the stage what they never could have imagined; so the best men in the world would earnestly take a peep of hell through a chink, whereas the worser would skulk away.’

“Do not thou be their caterer, William!  Avoid the writing of comedies and tragedies.  To make people laugh is uncivil, and to make people cry is unkind.  And what, after all, are these comedies and these tragedies?  They are what, for the benefit of all future generations, I have myself described them, —

’The whimsies of wantons and stories of dread, That make the stout-hearted look under the bed.’