t speech about cattle-stealing,
he began to belittle American literature, the poetry especially. Of
course he waxed eloquent about the royal line of poet-kings that had
made his country famous, and said the people who could claim
Shakespeare had reason to be the proudest nation on earth.
'Doubtless,' I said. 'But do you mean to say that Scotland has any
nearer claim upon Shakespeare than we have? I do not now allude to the
fact that in the large sense he is the common property of the
English-speaking world' (Salemina told me to say that), 'but
Shakespeare died in 1616, and the union of Scotland with England
didn't come about till 1707, nearly a century afterwards. You really
haven't anything to do with him! But as for us, we didn't leave
England until 1620, when Shakespeare had been perfectly dead four
years. We took very good care not to come away too soon. Chaucer and
Spenser were dead, too, and we had nothing to stay for!'"

I was obliged to relax here and give vent to a burst of merriment at
Francesca's absurdities.

"I could see that he had never regarded the matter in that light
before," she went on gayly, encouraged by my laughter, "but he braced
himself for the conflict, and said, 'I wonder that you didn't stay a
little longer while you were about it. Milton and Ben Jonson were
still alive; Bacon's Novum Organum was just coming out; and in thirty
or forty years you could have had L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, and
Paradise Lost; Newton's Principia, too, in 1687. Perhaps these were
all too serious and heavy for your national taste; still, one
sometimes likes to claim things one cannot fully appreciate. And then,
too, if you had once begun to stay, waiting for the great things to
happen and the great books to be written, you would never have gone,
for there would still have been Browning, Tennyson, and Swinburne to
delay you.'

"'If we couldn't stay to see out your great bards, we certainly
couldn't afford to remain and welcome your minor ones,' I answered
frigidly; 'but we wanted to be well out of the way before England
united with Scotland, knowing that if we were uncomfortable as things
were, it would be a good deal worse after the Union; and we had to
come home, anyway, and start our own poets. Emerson, Whittier,
Longfellow, Holmes, and Lowell had to be born.'

"'I suppose they had to be if you had set your mind on it,' he said,
'though personally I could have spared one or two on that roll of
honor.'

"'Ver