of Briton, and spelt it wrong. Incidentally, he lost America.
It is notable that all those eminent among the real Britons, who spelt
it right, respected and would parley with the American Revolution,
however jingo or legitimist they were; the romantic conservative Burke,
the earth-devouring Imperialist Chatham, even, in reality, the jog-trot
Tory North. The intractability was in the Elector of Hanover more than
in the King of England; in the narrow and petty German prince who was
bored by Shakespeare and approximately inspired by Handel. What really
clinched the unlucky companionship of England and Germany was the first
and second alliance with Prussia; the first in which we prevented the
hardening tradition of Frederick the Great being broken up by the Seven
Years' War; the second in which we prevented it being broken up by the
French Revolution and Napoleon. In the first we helped Prussia to escape
like a young brigand; in the second we helped the brigand to adjudicate
as a respectable magistrate. Having aided his lawlessness, we defended
his legitimacy. We helped to give the Bourbon prince his crown, though
our allies the Prussians (in their cheery way) tried to pick a few
jewels out of it before he got it. Through the whole of that period, so
important in history, it must be said that we were to be reckoned on for
the support of unreformed laws and the rule of unwilling subjects. There
is, as it were, an ugly echo even to the name of Nelson in the name of
Naples. But whatever is to be said of the cause, the work which we did
in it, with steel and gold, was so able and strenuous that an Englishman
can still be proud of it. We never performed a greater task than that
in which we, in a sense, saved Germany, save that in which a hundred
years later, we have now, in a sense, to destroy her. History tends to
be a facade of faded picturesqueness for most of those who have not
specially studied it: a more or less monochrome background for the drama
of their own day. To these it may well seem that it matters little
whether we were on one side or the other in a fight in which all the
figures are antiquated; Bonaparte and Blucher are both in old cocked
hats; French kings and French regicides are both not only dead men but
dead foreigners; the whole is a tapestry as decorative and as arbitrary
as the Wars of the Roses. It was not so: we fought for something real
when we fought for the old world against the new. If we want to know