y, I remember
attacking, with the complacency of youth, a German history of the
English drama, in six volumes. I lost courage long before the author
reached the age of Elizabeth, but I still recall the subject of the
opening chapter: it was devoted to the physical geography of Great
Britain. Writing, as the good German professor did, in the triumphant
hour of Taine's theory as to the significance of place, period, and
environment in determining the character of any literary production,
what could be more logical than to begin at the beginning? Have not the
chalk cliffs guarding the southern coast of England, have not the
fatness of the midland counties and the soft rainy climate of a North
Atlantic island, and the proud, tenacious, self-assertive folk that are
bred there, all left their trace upon _A Midsummer Night's Dream_, and
_Every Man in his Humour_ and _She Stoops to Conquer_? Undoubtedly.
Latitude and longitude, soil and rainfall and food-supply, racial
origins and crossings, political and social and economic conditions,
must assuredly leave their marks upon the mental and artistic
productiveness of a people and upon the personality of individual
writers.

Taine, who delighted to point out all this, and whose _English
Literature_ remains a monument of the defects as well as of the
advantages of his method, was of course not the inventor of the
climatic theory. It is older than Aristotle, who discusses it in his
treatise on _Politics_. It was a topic of interest to the scholars of
the Renaissance. Englishmen of the seventeenth century, with an unction
of pseudo-science added to their natural patriotism, discovered in the
English climate one of the reasons of England's greatness. Thomas
Sprat, writing in 1667 on the History of the Royal Society, waxes bold
and asserts: "If there can be a true character given of the Universal
Temper of any Nation under Heaven, then certainly this must be ascribed
to our countrymen, that they have commonly an unaffected sincerity,
that they love to deliver their minds with a sound simplicity, that
they have the middle qualities between the reserved, subtle southern
and the rough, unhewn northern people, that they are not extremely
prone to speak, that they are more concerned what others will think of
the strength than of the fineness of what they say, and that a
universal modesty possesses them. These qualities are so conspicuous
and proper to the soil that we often hear them objec