s shook their heads
over Leonidas and his three hundred when they went down to Thermopylae.
Respectable Spanish churchmen with shaven crowns scouted the dream of
Columbus. Respectable German folks attempted to dissuade Luther from
appearing before Charles and the princes and electors of the Empire,
and were scandalised when he declared that "Were there as many devils
in Worms as there were tiles on the house-tops, still would he on."
Nature makes us vagabonds, the world makes us respectable.

In the fine sense in which I take the word, the English are the
greatest vagabonds on the earth, and it is the healthiest trait in
their national character. The first fine day in spring awakes the
gipsy in the blood of the English workman, and incontinently he
"babbles of green fields." On the English gentleman lapped, in the
most luxurious civilisation, and with the thousand powers and resources
of wealth at his command, descends oftentimes a fierce unrest, a
Bedouin-like horror of cities and the cry of the money-changer, and in
a month the fiery dust rises in the track of his desert steed, or in
the six months' polar midnight he hears the big wave clashing on the
icy shore. The close presence of the sea feeds the Englishman's
restlessness. She takes possession of his heart like some fair
capricious mistress. Before the boy awakes to the beauty of cousin
Mary, he is crazed by the fascinations of ocean. With her voices of
ebb and flow she weaves her siren song round the Englishman's coasts
day and night. Nothing that dwells on land can keep from her embrace
the boy who has gazed upon her dangerous beauty, and who has heard her
singing songs of foreign shores at the foot of the summer crag. It is
well that in the modern gentleman the fierce heart of the Berserker
lives yet. The English are eminently a nation of vagabonds. The sun
paints English faces with all the colours of his climes. The
Englishman is ubiquitous. He shakes with fever and ague in the swampy
valley of the Mississippi; he is drowned in the sand pillars as they
waltz across the desert on the purple breath of the simoom; he stands
on the icy scalp of Mont Blanc; his fly falls in the sullen Norwegian
fiords; he invades the solitude of the Cape lion; he rides on his
donkey through the uncausewayed Cairo streets. That wealthy people,
under a despotism, should be travellers seems a natural thing enough.
It is a way of escape from the rigours of their conditio