ermans.'

'The Germans live in simple fashion, because they're poor. French
vanity's pretty and amusing. I don't know whether it's deep in them, for
I doubt their depth; but I know it's in their joints. The first spring
of a Frenchman comes of vanity. That you can't say of the English. Peace
to all! but I abhor cosmopolitanism. No man has a firm foothold who
pretends to it. None despises the English in reality. Don't be misled,
Miss Halkett. We're solid: that is the main point. The world feels our
power, and has confidence in our good faith. I ask for no more.'

'With Germans we are supercilious Celts; with Frenchmen we are sneering
Teutons:--Can we be loved, Mr. Tuckham?'

'That's a quotation from my friend Lydiard. Loved? No nation ever was
loved while it lived. As Lydiard says, it may be a good beast or a bad,
but a beast it is. A nation's much too big for refined feelings and
affections. It must be powerful or out of the way, or down it goes. When
a nation's dead you may love it; but I don't see the use of dying to
be loved. My aim for my country is to have the land respected. For that
purpose we must have power; for power wealth; for wealth industry;
for industry internal peace: therefore no agitation, no artificial
divisions. All's plain in history and fact, so long as we do not obtrude
sentimentalism. Nothing mixes well with that stuff--except poetical
ideas!'

Contrary to her anticipation, Cecilia was thrown more into companionship
with Mr. Tuckham than with Mr. Austin; and though it often vexed her,
she acknowledged that she derived a benefit from his robust antagonism
of opinion. And Italy had grown tasteless to her. She could hardly
simulate sufficient curiosity to serve for a vacant echo to Mr. Austin's
historic ardour. Pliny the Younger might indeed be the model of
a gentleman of old Rome; there might be a scholarly pleasure in
calculating, as Mr. Austin did, the length of time it took Pliny to
journey from the city to his paternal farm, or villa overlooking the
lake, or villa overlooking the bay, and some abstruse fun in the tender
ridicule of his readings of his poems to friends; for Mr. Austin smiled
effusively in alluding to the illustrious Roman pleader's foible of
verse: but Pliny bore no resemblance to that island barbarian Nevil
Beauchamp: she could not realize the friend of Trajan, orator, lawyer,
student, statesman, benefactor of his kind, and model of her own modern
English gentleman, though