be a Conservative. You knaw Jack Radford--biggest blackguard
in the parish--well, he be a Radical. Now you knaw.'"

Chance reminiscences such as those which have just been quoted will be
sufficient to indicate what, so far as a child could understand them,
the conditions and ways of thinking of the rural population were, and
how easy and unquestioning were the relations which then subsisted
between it and the old landed families. These relations were easy,
because the differences between the two classes were commonly assumed to
be static, one supporting and one protecting the other, as though they
resembled two geological strata. In slightly different language, society
was presented to us in the form of two immemorial orders--the men,
women, and children who touched their hats and curtsied, and the men,
women, and children to whom these salutations were made.

I am not, however--let me say it again--attempting to write a chapter of
English history, or to give a precise description of facts as they
actually were so much as to depict the impressions which facts, such as
they were, produced on children like myself through the medium of
personal circumstances. At the same time, in the formation of these
impressions we were far from being left to our own unaided
intelligence. Our impressions, as just depicted, were sedulously
confirmed and developed by carefully chosen governesses. One of these,
young as she was, was a really remarkable woman, for whom English
history had hatched itself into something like a philosophy. Her
philosophy had two bases, one being the postulate of the divine right of
kings, the other being her interpretation of the victory of the Normans
over the Anglo-Saxons. Charles I she presented to our imaginations as a
martyr; and, what was still more important, she seriously taught us that
the population of modern England was still divided, so far as race is
concerned, precisely as it was at the time of the completion of the
Domesday Book; that the peers and the landed gentry were more or less
pure-blooded Normans, and the mass of the people Saxons; that the
principal pleasure of the latter was to eat to repletion; that their
duty was to work for, that their privilege was to be patronized by,
Norman overlords and distinguished Norman Churchmen; and finally, that
of this Norman minority we ourselves were distinguished specimens. All
this we swallowed, aided in doing so by books like _Woodstock_ and
_Ivanh