To a country that lumbers on from precedent to precedent, and owes its very constitution to the pinch of practical exigencies, he brings the Jew's unifying sweep of idea. First, he is the encourager of the Young England party, for, conceiving himself child of a race of aristocrats whose mission is to civilize the world, he feels the duty of guidance to which these young English squires and nobles are born. The bourgeois he hates--only the pomp of sovereignty and the pathos of poverty move his soul; his lifelong dream is of a Tory democracy, wherein the nobles shall make happy the People that is exploited by the middle classes. Product of a theocratic state, where the rich and the poor are united in God, he is shocked by "the Two Nations" into which, by the gradual break-up of the feudal world, this England is split. The cry of the Chartists does not leave him cold. He is one in revolt with Byron and Shelley against a Philistine world. And later, to a mighty empire that has grown fortuitously, piecemeal, by the individual struggles of independent pioneers or isolated filibusters, he gives a unifying soul, a spirit, a mission. He perceives with Heine that as Puritan Britain is already the heir of ancient Palestine, and its State Church only the guardian of the Semitic principle, popularized, so is it by its moral and physical energy, the destined executant of the ideals of Zion; that it is planting the Law like a great shady tree in the tropic deserts and arid wastes of barbarism. That grandeur and romance of their empire, of which the English of his day are only dimly aware, because like their constitution it has evolved without a conscious principle, he, the outsider, sees. He is caught by the fascination of its vastness, of its magnificent possibilities. And in very deed he binds England closer to her colonies, and restores her dwindled prestige in the Parliament of Nations. He even proclaims her an Asiatic power. For his heart is always with his own people--its past glories, its persistent ubiquitous potency, despite ubiquitous persecution. He sees himself the appointed scion of a Chosen Race, the only race to which God has ever spoken, and perhaps the charm of acquired Cyprus is its propinquity to Palestine, the only soil on which God has ever deigned to reveal Himself. And, like his race, he has links with all the human panorama. He is in touch with the humors and graces of European courts and cities, has rapport with the rich-dyed, unchanging, double-dealing East, enjoys the picaresque life of the Spanish mountains: he feels the tragedy of vanished Rome, the marble appeal of ancient Athens, the mystery of the Pyramids, the futility of life; his books palpitate with world-problems. And, as I think these things, his face is transfigured and he becomes--beneath all his dazzle of deed--a Dreamer of the Ghetto. VI So think I. But what--as the country parson's sermon drones on--thinks the Sphinx? Who shall tell?