When we are stationary, and surrounded by
our connections, we are apt to be difficult and splenetic; but a literary
traveller never thinks of inconvenience, and still less of being out of
humour--curiosity reconciles him to the one, and his fame so smooths all
his intercourse, that he has no plea for the other.
It is probably for these reasons that we have so many panegyrists of our
Gallic neighbours, and there is withal a certain fashion of liberality
that has lately prevailed, by which we think ourselves bound to do them
more than justice, because they [are] our political enemies. For my own
part, I confess I have merely endeavoured to be impartial, and have not
scrupled to give a preference to my own country where I believed it was
due. I make no pretensions to that sort of cosmopolitanism which is
without partialities, and affects to consider the Chicktaw or the Tartars
of Thibet, with the same regard as a fellow-countryman. Such universal
philanthropists, I have often suspected, are people of very cold hearts,
who fancy they love the whole world, because they are incapable of loving
any thing in it, and live in a state of "moral vagabondage," (as it is
happily termed by Gregoire,) in order to be exempted from the ties of a
settled residence. _"Le cosmopolytisme de systeme et de fait n'est qu'un
vagabondage physique ou moral: nous devons un amour de preference a la
societe politique dont nous sommes membres.
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