Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 03.djvu/127

1791] any country.' Let an expeditious Dampmartin, on furlough, set out to return home from Paris, he cannot get along for 'peasants stopping him on the highway; overwhelming him with questions': the Maître de Poste will not send out the horses till you have well-nigh quarrelled with him, but asks always, What news? At Autun, in spite of the dark night and 'rigorous frost,' for it is now January 1791, nothing will serve but you must gather your wayworn limbs and thoughts, and 'speak to the multitudes from a window opening into the market-place.' It is the shortest method: This, good Christian people, is verily what an august Assembly seemed to me to be doing; this and no other is the news:

The good Dampmartin!—But, on the whole, are not Nations astonishingly true to their National character; which indeed runs in the blood? Nineteen hundred years ago, Julius Cæsar, with his quick sure eye, took note how the Gauls waylaid men. 'It is a habit of theirs,' says he, 'to stop travellers, were it even by constraint, and inquire whatsoever each of them may have heard or known about any sort of matter: in their towns, the common people beset the passing trader; demanding to hear from what regions he came, what things he got acquainted with there. Excited by which rumours and hearsays, they will decide about the weightiest matters; and necessarily repent next moment that they did it, on such guidance of uncertain reports, and many a traveller answering with mere fictions to please them, and get off.' Nineteen hundred years; and good Dampmartin, wayworn, in winter frost, probably with scant light of stars and fish-oil, still perorates from the Inn-window! This People is no longer called Gaulish; and it has wholly become braccatus, has got breeches, and suffered change enough: certain fierce German Franken came storming over; and, so to speak,