The railway system is having the effect of making all the English aristocracy Londoners. I am old enough to remember the time when there were still provincial people of rank in the north who spoke sound northern English, not dialect, but English with vowels and consonants, including the letter _r_. Their successors talk the half-articulate London language. It is said that some young Highland chieftains of the present day speak southern English only too beautifully. [Sidenote: National Differences.] [Sidenote: Irish.] [Sidenote: Scotch.] [Sidenote: Welsh.] Still, the national differences remain deep seated in the people and show no sign of losing their ancient strength. The Irish may become friendly fellow-subjects, but they will not be Anglicised. Neither will the Scotch be Anglicised, nor the Welsh. The present tendency is to accentuate nationality, not in hostility to England, but from the sentiment of a special patriotism. This is most significant, for hostility to England might pass away, but special patriotism is not likely to pass away. [Sidenote: Variety of Individual Character.] [Sidenote: Shakespeare.] [Sidenote: Scott.] In addition to these causes of variety there must ever remain the infinite differences of individual character. Shakespeare lived only in the English midlands, then scantily populated, and in the little London of his time. He had not travelled abroad, nor learned Italian,[89] nor talked like Milton with the _literati_ of the Continent; he had not, like Spenser, lived in the north of England and in Ireland; yet the diversities of character in his plays are as numerous as the _dramatis personæ_. Scott lived at the northern end of the island, in or near a minor capital city; he could speak no foreign tongue,[90] he knew England and London only by brief occasional visits, and hardly anything of the Continent, yet his novels abound in a variety like that of Shakespeare. These writers got their knowledge of human nature from the variety visible around them. Imagine, then, what must be the presumptuous _outrecuidance_ of the Frenchman who thinks that all the inhabitants of Great Britain have one character, and that he--the Frenchman--has got to the bottom of it, and can describe it, and tell his countrymen all about it, though he knows neither the land, nor the language, nor the people! Besides the denial of any æsthetic quality to English art, we find in French critics a peculiar disposition to describe it as being all alike. Eminent English artists (Reynolds, Gainsborough, De Wint, Müller, Cox, and many others) have preferred breadth to detail, yet French critics delight in representing the English painter as studying nature with an opera-glass, and representing all details with a wearisome and unnatural minuteness. Patriotic hostility, in art criticism as in the criticism of character, closes the eyes to variety.