"Don't I know who Britannia is?" Not I; and much doubt if you do! Is she Great Britain,--or Little Britain? Is she England, Scotland, Ireland, Canada, and the Indies,--or a small, dishonest, tailoring and engineering firm, with no connection over the way, and publicly fined at the police court for sneakingly supplying customers it had engaged not to? Is she a Queen, or an Actress, or a slave? Is she a Nation, mother of nations; or a slimy polype, multiplying by involuntary vivisection, and dropping half putrid pieces of itself wherever it crawls or contracts? In the world-feasts of the Nativity, can she sit, Madonna-like, saying: "Behold, I, and the children whom the Lord hath given me"? Or are her lips capable of such utterance--of any utterance--no more; the musical Rose of them cleft back into the long dumb trench of the lizard's; her motherhood summed in saying that she makes all the world's ditches dirtier with her spawn? And what has she on her head, in her hand, or on that,--Shield, I believe it is meant for,--which she sits on the edge of? A most truly symbolic position! For, you know, all those armour-plates and guns you pay for so pleasantly are indeed made, when you look into the matter, not at all to defend you against anybody--(no one ever pretends to say distinctly that the newest of them could protect you for twelve hours); but they are made that the iron masters may get commission on the iron, and the manufacturers commission on the manufacture. And so the Ironmongering and Manufacturing Britannia does very literally sit upon her Shield: the cognizance whereof, or--now too literally--the "Bearing,"--so obscured, becomes of small importance. Probably, in a little while, a convenient cushion--or, what not--may be substituted for St. George's Cross; to the public satisfaction. I must not question farther what any of these symbols may come to mean; I will tell you, briefly, what they meant once, and are yet, by courtesy, supposed to mean. They were all invented by the Greeks; and all, except the Cross, some twelve hundred years before the first Christmas; they became intelligible and beautiful first about Theseus' time.