or that reason all the real Englishmen loathed him like
leprosy. With the rise of the great England of the eighteenth century,
we find this open and emotional tone still maintained in letters and
politics, in arts and in arms. Perhaps the only quality which was
possessed in common by the great Fielding, and the great Richardson was
that neither of them hid their feelings. Swift, indeed, was hard and
logical, because Swift was Irish. And when we pass to the soldiers and
the rulers, the patriots and the empire-builders of the eighteenth
century, we find, as I have said, that they were, If possible, more
romantic than the romancers, more poetical than the poets. Chatham,
who showed the world all his strength, showed the House of Commons all
his weakness. Wolfe walked about the room with a drawn sword calling
himself Caesar and Hannibal, and went to death with poetry in his
mouth. Clive was a man of the same type as Cromwell or Bunyan, or, for
the matter of that, Johnson--that is, he was a strong, sensible man
with a kind of running spring of hysteria and melancholy in him. Like
Johnson, he was all the more healthy because he was morbid. The tales
of all the admirals and adventurers of that England are full of
braggadocio, of sentimentality, of splendid affectation. But it is
scarcely necessary to multiply examples of the essentially romantic
Englishman when one example towers above them all. Mr. Rudyard Kipling
has said complacently of the English, "We do not fall on the neck and
kiss when we come together." It is true that this ancient and universal
custom has vanished with the modern weakening of England. Sydney would
have thought nothing of kissing Spenser. But I willingly concede that
Mr. Broderick would not be likely to kiss Mr. Arnold-Foster, if that be
any proof of the increased manliness and military greatness of England.
But the Englishman who does not show his feelings has not altogether
given up the power of seeing something English in the great sea-hero of
the Napoleonic war. You cannot break the legend of Nelson. And across
the sunset of that glory is written in flaming letters for ever the
great English sentiment, "Kiss me, Hardy."

This ideal of self-repression, then, is, whatever else it is, not
English. It is, perhaps, somewhat Oriental, it is slightly Prussian,
but in the main it does not come, I think, from any racial or national
source. It is, as I have said, in some sense aristocratic; it comes not