r daughter in the oven unless she had been
there herself.

How shall I describe the English temper, which the Germans, high and
low, learned and ignorant, have so profoundly mistaken? You can get no
description of it from the Englishman pure and simple; he has no theory
of himself, and it bores him to hear himself described. Yet it is this
temper which has given England her great place in the world and which
has cemented the British Empire. It is to be found not in England alone,
but wherever there is a strain of English blood or an acceptance of
English institutions. You can find it in Australia, in Canada, in
America; it infects Scotland, and impresses Wales. It is everywhere in
our trenches to-day. It is not clannish, or even national, it is
essentially the lonely temper of a man independent to the verge of
melancholy. An admirable French writer of to-day has said that the best
handbook and guide to the English temper is Defoe's romance of _Robinson
Crusoe_. Crusoe is practical, but is conscious of the over-shadowing
presence of the things that are greater than man. He makes his own
clothing, teaches his goats to dance, and wrestles in thought with the
problems suggested by his Bible. Another example of the same temper may
be seen in Bunyan's _Pilgrim's Progress_, and yet another in
Wordsworth's _Prelude_. There is no danger that English thought will
ever underestimate the value and meaning of the individual soul. The
greatest English literature, it might almost be said, from Shakespeare's
_Hamlet_ to Browning's _The Ring and the Book_, is concerned with no
other subject. The age-long satire against the English is that in
England every man claims the right to go to heaven his own way. English
institutions, instead of subduing men to a single pattern, are devised
chiefly with the object of saving the rights of the subject and the
liberty of the individual. 'Every man in his humour' is an English
proverb, and might almost be a statement of English constitutional
doctrine. But this extreme individualism is the right of all, and does
not favour self-exaltation. The English temper has an almost morbid
dislike of all that is showy or dramatic in expression. I remember how a
Winchester boy, when he was reproached with the fact that Winchester has
produced hardly any great men, replied, 'No, indeed, I should think not.
We would pretty soon have knocked that out of them.' And the epigrams of
the English temper usually take th