own notion, and of this great sea-god she has been an easy-going and unquestioning lover, with an almost unnatural measure of tact. Her great rival beyond the Channel, against whose sea-lights her own send challenging gleams nightly, has commonly been characterised by a certain habit of impulse, and by an impetuous sincerity in the realisation of her Gallic convictions, which the typical Englishman has never understood. Whenever he has found himself beginning to admire this greater spontaneity of thought, and consequently of action, in France, he has thought it loyalty to his sovereign to harden his heart and dull his sensibilities, in Pharaonic fashion, against that modicum of approval which would be betrayed by even the early stages of favourable appreciation. This is true even to-day, and in general always has been true, notwithstanding the Continental affectations of the small-toed court of William II., the mental attitudes of a third Earl of Shaftesbury, or of a finer than he, the Matthew Arnold of our own time, of a Wordsworth sonneteering eloquently in praise of liberty, or of the present mild-eyed Oxford School of devotees of M. Paul Bourget; for the moment I am engaged in a determination of the broad lines of national characteristics, now fast disappearing as England becomes rapidly more cosmopolitan, not of some conflicting and troublesome exceptions proving the presence in this misty island of important varieties of blood not distinctively English. Individually, to the penetrating student of history and human nature, average England has not been. admirable, but it has rarely failed to be really interesting; for in the constantly varied Philistinism of our English race there has always been no end of ironical delight to be got from our picturesqueness, our absurd incompleteness, our unclassical note of provinciality. Yet at home, save in those surface eccentricities of aspect so easily caricatured by keen observers, Englishmen, speaking generally, have not shown great individuality. This can easily be maintained, in the face of Dickens and Hogarth and Cruikshank, who are to be conveniently taken out to prove my point: exceptiones probant regulas. The types of largest human interest have tended always to break away from England. Like the planet Saturn, if indeed not like the primeval god himself, whom, as he imagined, times and seasons served, and who was so enamoured of his own creations that he devoured his own children, who naturally, therefore, did not care to live at home, England has sloughed her fancied useless members in far-reaching rings of colonisation. The English island is not so small as it appears on the map; but it has never been large enough to hold men who thought too -- much ahead of them. Thinking behind has been tolerated, and indeed cultivated, and in such thinking no people has equalled the English; thinking under authority and from sanctioned prejudices has pleased Englishmen, has pleased Oxford and Cambridge, and has been dry-nursed into a national habit of mind by large and generous endowments. But any obvious breaking away from the conventional has so far taken a line of immoral eccentricity as to be too often damned as inconvenient in the good old-fashioned sense of the word, and practically proved so by being ejected. Such ejection masquerades to the English sense as the preservation of law and order. But is it not really keeping the cover down upon any unpleasant surprise that might start up from too sudden. a view of the ugly-headed Jack-in-the-box Truth? For every new idea, to men so well established as England's gentlemen have been and are, in Church and State and country seats, is almost ugly and inconvenient. The mere mechanical devices and scientific discoveries of the latter half of the nineteenth century, which have forced into a juxtaposition before undreamed of every quarter of the globe, have tempered isolated insolence, wherever found, to a certain appearance of urbanity and affectation of comity. But some peoples have needed tempering more than others, and our England of Spartan reti cence and self-sufficiency is essentially Doric England still. England, I said just now, has never been large enough to hold men who thought too much ahead of them. The sentence certainly needs illumination, but perhaps it becomes a more plausible assertion if I add that people in England who let their minds play freely are often forced to live lives of convention and compromise utterly inconsistent with their actual intellectual attitudes and their deepest convictions. English liberty is liberty of thought and expression, but not of action; and yet how energetic the English are! The English mind, while less imaginative than most, is, in all forms of logical activity, surer of its results than any other, and the steadiest in the world. Yet to be steady is not always to be sane, intelligent; and the want of imagination has been so essential a lack! With an all but unrivalled capacity for pure thinking when he chooses to exercise his mind, there are discernible quite unmistakable proofs that in practical realisation of his intellectual beliefs even the liberty-loving Englishman does not like to stand alone. He is constantly, moreover, postponing the donning of his thinking-cap; but in this he manifests perhaps merely the temporary indifference of conscious strength. The pleasant exhaustion consequent upon his manly activity in the hunting or football field, or in the lazy delights of the ineffable punt, is not directly conducive to thinking upon any subject more remote than how to have a bath before dinner. Like the healthy Spartan that he is, the Englishman in this mood regards with wholesome disgust the merest flavour of Attic salt. Attic salt partially paralyses his papillæ, scarcely keeping their virtue unimpaired for the detection of the proper bouquet of lusty port. With no necessity, therefore, of thinking, in the shadow of a Church and State that thinks for you, a Church whose bells, on each periodic Sunday, multitudinously applaud the achievements of dignified and self-sufficient England, and while there are so many legitimate and obviously superior interests in the open air, wooing river, pawing horses, eager hounds, England proudly rests content and who can wonder?-in the strength and dignity she has secured for herself by her own unaided efforts. With little capability of detecting the drift in society and in events, the streams of of the people, she is social tendency with the rise quite unharassed by the worry of these questions until they press and cry indecorously for attention. When at last actually this time has come, England grips all such problems one by one as they advance, and considers them with an extraordinary steadiness of intent vision, and an admirable and painstaking |