or from the _bon sens francais_ which can be at will trenchant
or trite. There is something common to all the Britons, which even Acts
of Union have not torn asunder. The nearest name for it is insecurity,
something fitting in men walking on cliffs and the verge of things.
Adventure, a lonely taste in liberty, a humour without wit, perplex
their critics and perplex themselves. Their souls are fretted like their
coasts. They have an embarrassment, noted by all foreigners: it is
expressed, perhaps, in the Irish by a confusion of speech and in the
English by a confusion of thought. For the Irish bull is a license with
the symbol of language. But Bull's own bull, the English bull, is "a
dumb ox of thought"; a standing mystification in the mind. There is
something double in the thoughts as of the soul mirrored in many waters.
Of all peoples they are least attached to the purely classical; the
imperial plainness which the French do finely and the Germans coarsely,
but the Britons hardly at all. They are constantly colonists and
emigrants; they have the name of being at home in every country. But
they are in exile in their own country. They are torn between love of
home and love of something else; of which the sea may be the explanation
or may be only the symbol. It is also found in a nameless nursery rhyme
which is the finest line in English literature and the dumb refrain of
all English poems--"Over the hills and far away."

The great rationalist hero who first conquered Britain, whether or no he
was the detached demigod of "Caesar and Cleopatra," was certainly a Latin
of the Latins, and described these islands when he found them with all
the curt positivism of his pen of steel. But even Julius Caesar's brief
account of the Britons leaves on us something of this mystery, which is
more than ignorance of fact. They were apparently ruled by that terrible
thing, a pagan priesthood. Stones now shapeless yet arranged in symbolic
shapes bear witness to the order and labour of those that lifted them.
Their worship was probably Nature-worship; and while such a basis may
count for something in the elemental quality that has always soaked the
island arts, the collision between it and the tolerant Empire suggests
the presence of something which generally grows out of Nature-worship--I
mean the unnatural. But upon nearly all the matters of modern
controversy Caesar is silent. He is silent about whether the language was
"Celtic"; and some