ng suddenly into a throne of artistic
omnipotence. Armour, music, standards, watch-fires, the noise of
drums, all the theatrical properties were thrown before him. This one
poor rhymster, having burnt his own rhymes, began to live that life of
open air and acted poetry of which all the poets of the earth have
dreamed in vain; the life for which the Iliad is only a cheap
substitute.

Upwards from his abstracted childhood, Adam Wayne had grown strongly
and silently in a certain quality or capacity which is in modern
cities almost entirely artificial, but which can be natural, and was
primarily almost brutally natural in him, the quality or capacity of
patriotism. It exists, like other virtues and vices, in a certain
undiluted reality. It is not confused with all kinds of other things.
A child speaking of his country or his village may make every mistake
in Mandeville or tell every lie in Munchausen, but in his statement
there will be no psychological lies any more than there can be in a
good song. Adam Wayne, as a boy, had for his dull streets in Notting
Hill the ultimate and ancient sentiment that went out to Athens or
Jerusalem. He knew the secret of the passion, those secrets which make
real old national songs sound so strange to our civilisation. He knew
that real patriotism tends to sing about sorrows and forlorn hopes
much more than about victory. He knew that in proper names themselves
is half the poetry of all national poems. Above all, he knew the
supreme psychological fact about patriotism, as certain in connection
with it as that a fine shame comes to all lovers, the fact that the
patriot never under any circumstances boasts of the largeness of his
country, but always, and of necessity, boasts of the smallness of it.

All this he knew, not because he was a philosopher or a genius, but
because he was a child. Any one who cares to walk up a side slum like
Pump Street, can see a little Adam claiming to be king of a
paving-stone. And he will always be proudest if the stone is almost
too narrow for him to keep his feet inside it.

It was while he was in such a dream of defensive battle, marking out
some strip of street or fortress of steps as the limit of his haughty
claim, that the King had met him, and, with a few words flung in
mockery, ratified for ever the strange boundaries of his soul.
Thenceforward the fanciful idea of the defence of Notting Hill in war
became to him a thing as solid as eating or drinking