You may say that that is stretching things a little. And yet I do not know that it is. Let us make concessions. If you will concede to me my little point about the descent of the English Novel from Cranmer’s prayer book and the English Bible--which cannot matter to you at all, I will willingly concede to you that it was the phraseology if not the doctrine of the Book of Common Prayer and the frame of mind of the Old Testament As By Law Appointed that gave to England the Empire of India and to the world the United States of North America, those two shining products of English stiff-neckedness and non-theological Bible-reading. For how without the Books of Kings could either Clive or, say, Andrew Jackson have found heart or courage to continue in their courses? Of course a thought or so might be given to North’s _Plutarch_ that was published in 1579. Be that as it may, what I am here getting at is the fact that preceding and underlying the ornate florescences of Lyly and the prodigious formlessnesses of Spenser and preceding and underlying the incredible verbal felicity and neat plottings of Shakespeare himself went the stream of dogged, menacing prose and the realist’s native imagery of those two religious compilations. And that subterranean stream immensely fecundated--to make no larger claim--at once the Anglo-Saxon national character and the literature that is to be found in the English language. I am aware that here we are on ticklish ground and that reformers and the advanced generally deny with a great deal of heat that literature has any influence at all on peoples. I remember once being furiously lectured by the most moral and one of the most advanced of English novelists--being furiously and minatorily taken to task because mildly and to make conversation I alleged that _Don Quixote_ had something to do with the passing of the sham chivalric spirit in Europe. The lecture was indeed so furious that, being a non-combative person and caring nothing about the matter, I have from that day to this rather given up considering the subject at all. You see, my friend the novelist was so notoriously virtuous and benevolent that hitherto I should have hated to hurt his feelings by advancing that anyone could be influenced by any book at all. For what he alleged, like an apostle announcing some kind of creed, was that populaces influence literature--that Cervantes was produced because a widespread spirit of mockery for chivalry, real or sham, was so abroad in the world that _Don Quixote_ was written merely in answer to a demand, as articles on the Calcutta Sweepstake are written about the time when Derby Day approaches.