These friends, it has been said, are not such a very numerous
company after all. Most of them are children of our own soil,
their spirits were made in England, or at least in Great Britain,
or, perhaps, came of English stock across the seas, like our dear
old Leather Stocking and Madam Hester Prynne. Probably most of us
are insular enough to confess this limitation; even if we be so
unpatriotic to read far more new French than new English novels.
One may study M. Daudet, and not remember his Sidonie as we
remember Becky, nor his Petit Chose or his Jack as we remember
David Copperfield. In the Paradise of Fiction are folk of all
nations and tongues; but the English (as Swedenborg saw them doing
in his vision of Heaven) keep very much to themselves. The
American visitors, or some of them, disdain our old acquaintances,
and associate with Russian, Spanish, Lithuanian, Armenian heroes
and heroines, conversing, probably, in some sort of French. Few of
us "poor islanders" are so cosmopolitan; we read foreign novels,
and yet among all the brilliant persons met there we remember but a
few. Most of my own foreign friends in fiction wear love-locks and
large boots, have rapiers at their side which they are very ready
to draw, are great trenchermen, mighty fine drinkers, and somewhat
gallant in their conduct to the sex. There is also a citizen or
two from Furetiere's "Roman Bourgeois," there is Manon, aforesaid,
and a company of picaroons, and an archbishop, and a lady styled
Marianne, and a newly ennobled Count of mysterious wealth, and two
grisettes, named Mimi and Musette, with their student-lovers.
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