himself--the priests, politicians, actors, pedagogues, and shopkeepers. The _man_ is he who lives and relies directly on nature, not on the needs or weaknesses of other people. These self-sufficing Englishmen, in their reserve and decision, seemed to me truly men, creatures of fixed rational habit, people in whose somewhat inarticulate society one might feel safe and at home. The low pressure at which their minds seemed to work showed how little they were alarmed about anything: things would all be managed somehow. They were good company even when they said nothing. Their aspect, their habits, their invincible likes and dislikes seemed like an anchor to me in the currents of this turbid age. They were a gift of the gods, like the sunshine or the fresh air or the memory of the Greeks: they were superior beings, and yet more animal than the rest of us, calmer, with a different scale of consciousness and a slower pace of thought. There were glints in them sometimes of a mystical oddity; they loved the wilds; and yet ordinarily they were wonderfully sane and human, and responsive to the right touch. Moreover, these semi-divine animals could talk like men of the world. If some of them, and not the least charming, said little but "Oh, really," and "How stupid of me," I soon discovered how far others could carry scholarly distinction, rich humour, and refinement of diction. I confess, however, that when they were very exquisite or subtle they seemed to me like cut flowers; the finer they were the frailer, and the cleverer the more wrong-headed. Delicacy did not come to them, as to Latin minds, as an added ornament, a finer means of being passionate, a trill in a song that flows full-chested from the whole man; their purity was Puritanism, it came by exclusion of what they thought lower. It impoverished their sympathies, it severed them from their national roots, it turned to affectation or fanaticism, it rendered them acrid and fussy and eccentric and sad. It is truly English, in one sense, to fume against England, individuality tearing its own nest; and often these frantic poses neutralize one another and do no harm on the whole. Nevertheless it is the full-bodied Englishman who has so far ballasted the ship, he who, like Shakespeare, can wear gracefully the fashion of the hour, can play with fancy, and remain a man. When he ceases to be sensual and national, adventurous and steady, reticent and religious, the Englishman is a mad ghost; and wherever he prevails he turns pleasant England, like Greece, into a memory.