When the Englishman hears the American, and especially the American woman, slip so glibly from Rodin to Rameses, from Kant to kakemonos, he dubs her superficial. Perhaps she is, considering only the actual knowledge possessed compared with the potentiality of knowledge on any one of the topics. There is a story which has been fitted to many persons and many occasions, but which thirty years ago was told of Mr. Gladstone, though for all I know it may go back to generations before he was born. Mr. Gladstone, so the story ran, was present at a dinner where among the guests was a distinguished Japanese; and, as not seldom happened, Mr. Gladstone monopolised the conversation, talking with fluency and seeming omniscience on a vast range of subjects, among which Japan came in for its share of attention. The distinguished stranger was asked later for his opinion of the English statesman. "A wonderful man," he said, "a truly wonderful man! He seems to know all about everything in the world except Japan. He knows nothing at all about Japan." The specialist in a single subject can always find the holes in the information on that subject of the "universal specialist." But it is worth noticing that, like almost every other salient trait of the American character, this American desire to become a universal specialist--this reaching after the all-culture and all-knowledge--is an essentially Anglo-Saxon or English characteristic. The German may be content to spend his whole life laboriously probing into one small hole. The Frenchman (let me say again that I thoroughly recognise that all national generalisations are unsound) will cheerfully wave aside with a _la-la-la_ whole realms of knowledge which do not interest him. But all Englishmen and all Americans would be Crichtons and Sydneys if they could. And--perhaps on the principle of setting a thief to catch a thief--although the all-round man is the ideal of both peoples, each is equally suspicious of an intellectual rotundity (in another person) too nearly complete. Americans rather like to repeat that story of Mr. Gladstone, when the talk is of English culture.