When, after months of travel, one returns to England, he can taste, smell, and feel the difference in the atmosphere, physical and moral—the curious damp, blunt, good-humoured, happy-go-lucky, old-established, slow-seeming formlessness of everything. You hail a porter; if you tell him you have plenty of time, he muddles your things amiably with an air of, “It’ll be all right,” till you have only just time. But if you tell him you have no time—he will set himself to catch that train for you, and catch it faster than a porter of any other country. Let no foreigner, however, experiment to prove the truth of this, for a porter—like any other Englishman—is incapable of taking a foreigner seriously (after a year of war he is not even yet taking the Germans seriously); and, quite friendly, but a little pitying, will lose him the train, assuring the unfortunate that he can’t possibly know what train he wants to catch. The Englishman must have a thing brought under his nose before he will act; bring it there and he will go on acting after everybody else has stopped. He lives very much in the moment because he is essentially a man of facts and not a man of imagination. Want of imagination makes him, philosophically speaking, rather ludicrous; in practical affairs it handicaps him at the start; but once he has “got going”—as we say—it is of incalculable assistance to his stamina. The Englishman, partly through this lack of imagination and nervous sensibility, partly through his inbred dislike of extremes and habit of minimising the expression of everything, is a perfect example of the conservation of energy. It is very difficult to come to the end of him. Add to this his unimaginative practicality, and tenacious moderation, his inherent spirit of competition—not to say pugnacity—a spirit of competition so extreme that it makes him, as it were, patronize Fate; add the sort of vulgarity that grows like fungus on people who despise ideas and analysis, and make a cult of unintellectuality; add a peculiar, ironic, “don’t care” sort of humour; an underground humaneness, and an ashamed idealism—and you get some notion of the pudding of English character. It has a kind of terrible coolness, a rather awful level-headedness—by no means reflected in his Press. The Englishman makes constant small blunders; but few, almost no, deep mistakes. He is a slow starter, but there is no stronger finisher, because he has by temperament and training the faculty of getting through any job he gives his mind to with a minimum expenditure of vital energy; nothing is wasted in expression, style, spread-eagleism; everything is instinctively kept as near to the practical heart of the matter as possible. He is—to the eyes of an artist—distressingly matter-of-fact; a tempting mark for satire. And yet he is at bottom an idealist, though it is his nature to snub, disguise, and mock his own inherent optimism. To admit enthusiasm is