" (3)
At the same time, many are unpolite--not because they mean to be
so, but because they are awkward, and perhaps know no better.
Thus, when Gibbon had published the second and third volumes of
his 'Decline and Fall,' the Duke of Cumberland met him one day,
and accosted him with, "How do you do, Mr. Gibbon? I see you
are always AT IT in the old way--SCRIBBLE, SCRIBBLE, SCRIBBLE!"
The Duke probably intended to pay the author a compliment,
but did not know how better to do it, than in this blunt and
apparently rude way.
Again, many persons are thought to be stiff, reserved, and proud,
when they are only shy. Shyness is characteristic of most people
of Teutonic race. It has been styled "the English mania," but it
pervades, to a greater or less degree, all the Northern nations.
The ordinary Englishman, when he travels abroad, carries his
shyness with him. He is stiff, awkward, ungraceful,
undemonstrative, and apparently unsympathetic; and though he may
assume a brusqueness of manner, the shyness is there, and cannot
be wholly concealed. The naturally graceful and intensely social
French cannot understand such a character; and the Englishman is
their standing joke--the subject of their most ludicrous
caricatures. George Sand attributes the rigidity of the natives
of Albion to a stock of FLUIDE BRITANNIQUE which they carry about
with them, that renders them impassive under all circumstances,
and "as impervious to the atmosphere of the regions they traverse
as a mouse in the centre of an exhausted receiver.
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