disaffected Scotch and Irish noblemen and
officers—the Milord became once more a
Gryphon, a bogey, a hideous fable.

Voltaire, who ought to have known England
and the English well, is rather shy on the
subject of the English Milord. He shirks him. He
treats of him a little in his Siècle de Louis XV.,
concerning the battle of Fontenoy; he tells you
elsewhere, that the Milord is one of that bizarre
country where they "cut off the tails of horses
and the heads of kings; "but, on the whole,
he is reserved and taciturn on the subject of
the English Milord. He knew him and the
ridiculously false impression entertained of
him by the French; but he did not, doubtless,
consider it worth his while to undeceive them
just then.

Rousseau hated English Milords as he hated
most people who strove to do him good (which
many English noblemen and gentlemen essayed
to do). There is spleen against the English
nation and aristocracy scattered through his
writings; but the philosophic citizen and
"philanthropist" of Geneva, knew too well
what England and the English were,
systematically to abuse or vilify them. Yet
he upset no fallacy, exposed no error. In
the Nouvelle Heloïse he has even gone out
of the way to misrepresent the Milord:
who assumes the guise of a morosely
pensive misanthrope, skulking about cataracts
and mentally browsing in deserted grottoes.

So continued the English Milord to the time
of that old novelist of Louis Seize's time,
Pigault le Brun, the only palliation of whose
indelicacy lies in his always making virtue to
prevail and vice to be chastised at the end of
volume III. Pigault le Brun's Milord was
an austere yet ruffianly, proud yet jocose,
avaricious yet munificent, accomplished yet
coarse-spoken aristocrat—a sort of mélange
of Squire Western, Sir Charles Grandison,
Pigault's own Monsieur Botte, Voltaire's
Doctor Pangloss, and our English Commodore
Trunnion. He travelled about in a postchaise,
fitted up half as a tavern, half as a doctor's
shop, always with a beautiful daughter, always
with a negro page whom he beat and kicked
and gave unnumbered guineas to. He swore
tremendous oaths at postillions. He was the
terror of postmasters, cooks, scullions,
innkeepers, and chambermaids. Lastly, he had
an irresistible penchant for adopting orphan
children (boys) and ultimately marrying them
to the charming Miss, his daughter and sole
heiress.

Pigault le Brun lived far into the Empire;
but the time and scene of his novels are
mostly laid at a period anterior to the great
revolution. In the days of the Republic, the
Directory, and the Consulate, the Milord
Anglais assumed quite a new phase of character.
He became, all at once, an emissary of
"Pitt et Coburg" always hovering about the
frontiers of France, or mingling in disguise
among its population; went about laden with
sacks of English gold wherewith to bribe the
enemies of freedom. The English Milord kept
head against the bleus in the impenetrable
bocages of the Vendée; his gold it was that
kept the army of Condé organised, who nerved
the conspirators of the infernal machine to
their desperate attempt, who brought Georges
Cadoudal and his murderous Chouans to
Paris. The contagious breath of English
Milords (headed by that arch Milord, Nelson,)
blew the flat-bottomed boats of Boulogne to
the winds and caused that regrettable sinistre,
Trafalgar.

When the fatal obtuseness of the Milord
Wellington, who never could discover when
he was beaten, had brought (treason aiding)
the allied armies to Paris, the English Milord,
cameleon-like, once more changed his hue.
Then was he first heard of as a boxer, as an
eater of raw beefsteaks, as a maker of
tremendous paris or bets, and as a monomaniacal
amateur in horseflesh. The English being just
then the strongest, and being through their
upholding of the house of Bourbon on good
terms with the French aristocracy, there was
in Paris, from 1815 to 1818, a species of
Anglomania or Milordophobia in which the
Milord Anglais was the arbiter elegantiarum,
the "cynosure of all eyes," "the glass of
fashion and the mould of form." Novelists,
dramatists, essayists, artists immediately seized
on the new English Milord and made a lion of
him. He was represented in the salons of
Frascati and the gambling rooms of the Palais
Royal, wrenching handfuls of sovereigns from
the pockets of his great-coat with many
capes, and throwing them wildly on the rouge
and the noir. He had horses in his drawing-
room and bouledogues in his bed. He boxed
continually. He drove vehicles like cockle
shells (or like those rendered so famous by
Mr. Romeo Coates and Mr. Pea Green
Haynes), he dined sumptuously at Véry's
and Vefour's, and he drank (which is perhaps
the only thing of the series that the English
Milord did really and truly do, during the
occupation of Paris by the allies) enormous
quantities of execrable champagne, which he
thought delicious. That champagne plot was
the greatest, sweetest, most ample revenge the
French ever took upon us for Waterloo; and
the disgrace of that day has been, to my
mind, completely washed out by the floods
of bad champagne which were foraged out
from the cellars of Rheims in 1815, bought by
speculators at about seventy-five centimes
a bottle, and sold to the English and the
Cossacks at about from six to ten francs.
Was not that vengeance on the Islanders and
the Barbarians?

The English Milord once more changed
during the latter part of the reign of Louis
XVIII., and the whole of that of Charles X.
There was a famous piece called Les Anglaises
pour rire, performed at the Palais Royal, in
which not only Milords but Miladis were
ridiculed, and which had an astonishing run.
After this the Censure, the gloom-inspiring