And it is a true picture of British activities. Even thus has England on the whole ruled the territories into which adventure or economic motives drew her. The very Ambassador from Germany, Prince Lichnowsky, agrees with Rhodes that the salvation of mankind lies in British imperialism. But note how the less spiritual factors are ignored, how the prophet presents his people as a nation of pioneer martyrs, how the mission, finally become conscious of itself, gilds with backward rays the whole path of national advance, as the trail of light from the stern of a vessel gives the illusion that it has come by a shining road. Missions are not discovered till they are already in action. Not unlike those archers of whom the Talmud wittily says, they first shoot the arrow and then fix the target, nations ascribe to themselves purposes of which they were originally unconscious. First comes the tingling consciousness of achievement and power, then a glamour of retrospective legend to explain and justify it. Thus it is that that great struggle for sea-power to which Spain, Portugal, Holland, England, and France all contributed maritime genius and boundless courage, becomes transformed under the half-accidental success of one nation into an almost religious epic of a destined wave-ruler. There could not be a finer British spirit than Mr. Chesterton's fallen friend, the poet Vernede, yet even he writes:-- God grant to us the old Armada weather. Thomson was not poet enough--nor the eighteenth century naive enough--to create a legend in sober earnest. But the fact that he throws "Rule, Britannia" eight centuries back to the time of Alfred the Great, before whom this glorious pageant of his country's future is prophetically unrolled, serves to illustrate the retrospective habit of national missions. The history of England is brief, and the mission evolved in her seven centuries has not yet finally shaped itself, is indeed now shaping itself afresh in the furnace of war. Her poets have not always troubled with the soul of her. They have often, as Courthope complained of Keats, turned away from her destinies to Magic casements opening on the foam Of faery lands in perilous seas forlorn.