“I am coming to that,” she responded. “It was just at this point that, goaded into secret fury by my innocent speech about cattle-stealing, he began to belittle American literature, the poetry especially. Of course he waxed eloquent about the royal line of poet-kings that had made his country famous, and said the people who could claim Shakespeare had reason to be the proudest nation on earth. 'Doubtless,' I said. 'But do you mean to say that Scotland has any nearer claim upon Shakespeare than we have? I do not now allude to the fact that in the large sense he is the common property of the English-speaking world' (Salemina told me to say that), 'but Shakespeare died in 1616, and the union of Scotland with England didn't come about till 1707, nearly a century afterwards. You really haven't anything to do with him! But as for us, we didn't leave England until 1620, when Shakespeare had been perfectly dead four years. We took very good care not to come away too soon. Chaucer and Spenser were dead too, and we had nothing to stay for!'” I was obliged to relax here and give vent to a burst of merriment at Francesca's absurdities. “I could see that he had never regarded the matter in that light before,” she went on gaily, encouraged by my laughter, “but he braced himself for the conflict, and said 'I wonder that you didn't stay a little longer while you were about it. Milton and Ben Jonson were still alive; Bacon's Novum Organum was just coming out; and in thirty or forty years you could have had L'Allegro, Il Penseroso and Paradise Lost; Newton's Principia, too, in 1687. Perhaps these were all too serious and heavy for your national taste; still one sometimes likes to claim things one cannot fully appreciate. And then, too, if you had once begun to stay, waiting for the great things to happen and the great books to be written, you would never have gone, for there would still have been Browning, Tennyson, and Swinburne to delay you.' “'If we couldn't stay to see out your great bards, we certainly couldn't afford to remain and welcome your minor ones,' I answered frigidly; 'but we wanted to be well out of the way before England united with Scotland, knowing that if we were uncomfortable as things were, it would be a good deal worse after the Union; and we had to come home anyway, and start our own poets. Emerson, Whittier, Longfellow, Holmes, and Lowell had to be born.' “'I suppose they had to be if you had set your mind on it,' he said, 'though personally I could have spared one or two on that roll of honour.' “'Very probably,' I remarked, as thoroughly angry now as he intended I should be. 'We cannot expect you to appreciate all the American poets; indeed, you cannot appreciate all of your own, for the same nation doesn't always furnish the writers and the readers. Take your precious Browning, for example! There are hundreds of Browning Clubs in America, and I never heard of a single one in Scotland.'