The father and mother of this virilistic movement among the well-read were Mr. Andrew Lang, the most donnish of wits, and one of the wittiest. Lang would review a new book in a great many places at once. So, when he blessed, his blessing would carry as far as the more wholly literal myrrh and frankincense wafted abroad by the hundred hands of Messrs. Boot. The fame of Mr. Rider Haggard was one of Lang's major products. Mr. Haggard was really a man of some mettle. By persons fitted to judge he was believed to have at his fingers' ends all the best of what is known and thought by mankind about turnips and other crops with which they may honourably and usefully rotate. But it was for turning his back upon these humdrum sustainers of life and writing, in a rich Corinthian style, accounts of fancy "slaughters grim and great," that his flame lived and spread aloft, as Milton says, in the pure eyes and perfect witness of Lang. Another nursling of Lang's was the wittier Kipling, then a studious youth exuding Border ballads and Bret Harte from every pore, but certified to carry about him, on paper, the proper smell of blood and tobacco. Deep answered unto deep. In Germany, too, the pibrochs of the professors were rending the skies, and poets of C4 medical grade were tearing the mask from the hideous face of peace. The din throughout the bookish parts of Central and Western Europe suggested to an irreverent mind a stage with a quaint figure of some short-sighted pedagogue of tradition coming upon it, round-shouldered, curly-toed, print-fed, physically inept, to play the part of the war-horse in Job, swallowing the ground with fierceness and rage, and "saying among the trumpets 'Ha, ha!'" You may see it all as a joke. Or as something rather more than a joke, in its effects. Mr. Yeats suggested that an all-seeing eye might perceive the Trojan War to have come because of a tune that a boy had once piped in Thessaly. What if all our millions of men had to be killed because some academic Struwwelpeter, fifty years since, took on himself to pipe up "Take the nasty peace away!" and kick the shins of Concord, his most kindly nurse? III If he did, it was natural. All Struwwelpeters are natural. All heirs-apparent are said to take the opposite side to their fathers still on the throne. And those learned men were heirs to the age of the Crystal Palace, the age of the first "Locksley Hall," with its "parliament of man" and "federation of the world," the age that laid a railway line along the city moat of Amiens and opened capacious Hôtels de la Paix throughout Latin Europe, the age when passports withered and Baedeker was more and more, the age that in one of its supreme moments of ecstasy founded the London International College, an English public school (now naturally dead) in which the boys were to pass some of their terms among the heathen in Germany or France.