builds up her own standards slowly and hesitatingly by an endless
process of comparison. The saving in time is beneficial, and some
defects in taste have been remedied. But human delight does not
respond to authority. It is the hour of rapturous reading and the
power of secret thinking which make for personal distinction. The
shipwreck of education, says Dr. William James, is to be unable,
after years of study, to recognize unticketed eminence. The best
result obtainable from college, with its liberal and honourable
traditions, is that training in the humanities which lifts the raw
boy and girl into the ranks of the understanding; enabling them to
sympathize with men's mistakes, to feel the beauty of lost causes,
the pathos of misguided epochs, "the ceaseless whisper of permanent
ideals."

The Estranging Sea

"God bless the narrow sea which keeps her off,
And keeps our Britain whole within itself."

So speaks "the Tory member's elder son," in "The Princess":--

"... God bless the narrow seas!
I wish they were a whole Atlantic broad";

and the transatlantic reader, pausing to digest this conservative
sentiment, wonders what difference a thousand leagues would make.
If the little strip of roughened water which divides Dover from
Calais were twice the ocean's breadth, could the division be any
wider and deeper than it is?

We Americans cross from continent to continent, and are merged
blissfully into the Old-World life. Inured from infancy to contrasts,
we seldom resent the unfamiliar. Our attitude towards it is, for the
most part, frankly receptive, and full of joyous possibilities. We
take kindly, or at least tolerantly, to foreign creeds and customs.
We fail to be affronted by what we do not understand. We are not
without a shadowy conviction that there may be other points of view
than our own, other beliefs than those we have been taught to cherish.
Mr. Birrell, endeavouring to account for Charlotte Bronte's
hostility to the Belgians,--who had been uncommonly kind to
her,--says that she "had never any patience" with Catholicism. The
remark invites the reply of the Papal chamberlain to Prince Herbert
Bismarck, when that nobleman, being in attendance upon the Emperor,
pushed rudely--and unbidden--into Pope Leo's audience chamber. "I
am Prince Herbert Bismarck," shouted the German. "That," said the
urbane Italian, "explains, but does not excuse your conduct."

So much has been said and writ