The Englishman must have a thing brought under his nose before he will act; bring it there and he will go on acting after everybody else has stopped. He lives very much in the moment, because he is essentially a man of facts and not a man of imagination. Want of imagination makes him, philosophically speaking, rather ludicrous; in practical affairs it handicaps him at the start, but once he has "got going," as we say, it is of incalculable assistance to his stamina. The Englishman, partly through this lack of imagination and nervous sensibility, partly through his inbred dislike of extremes and habit of minimizing the expression of everything, is a perfect example of the conservation of energy. It is very difficult to come to the end of him. Add to this unimaginative, practical, tenacious moderation an inherent spirit of competition--not to say pugnacity--so strong that it will often show through the coating of his "Live and let live," half-surly, half-good-humored manner; add a peculiar, ironic, "don't care" sort of humor; an underground but inveterate humaneness, and an ashamed idealism--and you get some notion of the pudding of English character. Its main feature is a kind of terrible coolness, a rather awful level-headedness. The Englishman makes constant small blunders; but few, almost no, deep mistakes. He is a slow starter, but there is no stronger finisher because he has by temperament and training the faculty of getting through any job that he gives his mind to with a minimum expenditure of vital energy; nothing is wasted in expression, style, spread-eagleism; everything is instinctively kept as near to the practical heart of the matter as possible. He is--to the eye of an artist--distressingly matter-of-fact, a tempting mark for satire. And yet he is in truth an idealist, though it is his nature to snub, disguise, and mock his own inherent optimism. To admit enthusiasms is "bad form" if he is a "gentleman"; "swank" or mere waste of good heat if he is not a "gentleman." England produces more than its proper percentage of cranks and poets; it may be taken that this is Nature's way of redressing the balance in a country where feelings are not shown, sentiments not expressed, and extremes laughed at. Not that the Englishman lacks heart; he is not cold, as is generally supposed--on the contrary he is warm-hearted and feels very strongly; but just as peasants, for lack of words to express their feelings, become stolid, so it is with the Englishman from sheer lack of the habit of self-expression. Nor is the Englishman deliberately hypocritical; but his tenacity, combined with his powerlessness to express his feelings, often gives him the appearance of a hypocrite. He is inarticulate, has not the clear and fluent cynicism of expansive natures wherewith to confess exactly how he stands. It is the habit of men of all nations to want to have things both ways; the Englishman is unfortunately so unable