Hail, Gallia’s daughters! easy, brisk, and free;

Good humour’d, débonnaire, and dégagée:

Though still fantastic, frivolous, and vain,

Let not their airs and graces give us pain:

Or fair, or brown, at toilet, prayer, or play,

Their motto speaks their manners — toujours gai.

    But for that powder’d compound of grimace,

That capering he-she thing of fringe and lace;

With sword and cane, with bag and solitaire,

Vain of the full-dress’d dwarf, his hopeful heir,

How does our spleen and indignation rise,

When such a tinsell’d coxcomb meets our eyes,

Among the figures who are coming out of church, an affected, flighty Frenchwoman, with her fluttering fop of a husband, and a boy, habited à-la-mode de Paris, claim our first attention. In dress, air, and manner, they have a national character. The whole congregation, whether male or female, old or young, carry the air of their country in countenance, dress, and deportment. Like the three principal figures, they are all marked with some affected peculiarity. Affectation, in a woman, is supportable upon no other ground than that general indulgence we pay to the omnipotence of beauty, which in a degree sanctifies whatever it adopts. In a boy, when we consider that the poor fellow is attempting to copy what he has been taught to believe praiseworthy, we laugh at it; the largest portion of ridicule falls upon his tutors; but in a man, it is contemptible!

The old fellow, in a black periwig, has a most vinegar-like aspect, and looks with great contempt at the frippery gentlewoman immediately before him. The woman, with a demure countenance, seems very piously considering how she can contrive to pick the embroidered beau’s pocket. Two old sybils joining their withered lips in a chaste salute, is nauseous enough, but, being a national custom, must be forgiven. The divine seems to have resided in this kingdom long enough to acquire a roast-beef countenance. A little boy, whose woollen nightcap is pressed over a most venerable flowing periwig, and the decrepit old man, leaning upon a crutch-stick, who is walking before him, “I once considered,” says Mr. Ireland, “as two vile caricatures, out of nature, and unworthy the artist. Since I have seen the peasantry of Flanders, and the plebeian youth of France, I have in some degree changed my opinion, but still think them rather outré.”

Under a sign of the Baptist’s Head is written, Good Eating; and on eac............