who under English conditions had already made a step in the same direction. But then, he did not appropriate what was English in Richardson, but only what was cosmopolitan; or, rather, the specifically English element was soon thrown off, and the genuine French characteristics speedily reappeared. The Anglomania in literature and in society corresponds, that is, to a fashion essentially superficial and transitory. Anglomania, we are told, was rampant in France before the Revolution; it made 'appalling progress'; it tended to replace the 'social spirit' by 'individualism.' Frenchmen read Shakespeare; drank tea; dressed like jockeys; imported race-horses; set up English clubs and had assemblées à l'anglaise destructive of the old French salon. As Fox observed, the imitation was equally ridiculous on both sides of the Channel. It was ridiculous, because superficial. We know perfectly well that to land at Calais was then—as it is even now to some degree—to find oneself in a new world, with radically different manners, religion, politics, institutions, and ways of thinking. A Frenchman might put on top-boots and keep a bull-dog without being really one bit the more a genuine John Bull. He was only masquerading—a mere
