They who have travelled know that the Frenchman, in the profusion of his politeness, makes many offers which he expects will be refused; and should you really stand in need of his assistance, it is a doubt whether he will give himself much trouble to alleviate your distress, or disentangle your embarrassment: but an Englishman will do you a piece of service secretly, and be distressed with the expressions of your gratitude.

The former will overwhelm you with professions of friendship, without the least real regard; the latter will be surly, and at the same time go all lengths in soothing your sorrows and relieving your wants.

Bluntness is said to be one of the characteristics of the English, and is allowed to be a natural consequence of their sincerity. When it does not degenerate to rusticity, it is not unpleasing.

But the good effects of brevity and conciseness are not to be found only in writing and conversation. There is something analogous to them in the arts of painting and sculpture. There is a concealment and shading, which sets off more beautifully, and displays more clearly, than an open, an undisguised, a glaring representation. Timanthes took for the subject of a picture, the sacrifice of Iphigenia at Aulis. He gave a degree of grief to the spectators, proportionate to the nearness or distance of their relation to the lovely victim. Thus he had exhausted the passion before he came to the father, and, at a loss to express a sufficient anguish, he represented the disconsolate parent concealing his face in the folds of his garments.

Were the causes of the pleasing and powerful effects of conciseness to be investigated, one of them might perhaps be found to be the pleasure which a reader, or spectator, takes in having something left for his own sagacity to discover. The mind greedily snatches at a hint, and delights to enlarge upon it; but frigid is the employment of attending to those productions, the authors of which have laboured every thing into such perspicuity, that the observer has nothing to do but barely to look on. Things may be too obvious to excite attention. The sun, the moon, and the stars, roll over our heads every day without attracting our notice; but we survey with eager curiosity, a comet, an eclipse, or any other extraordinary phenomenon in nature.