, Africa, Gaul, to our remote
Britain, insisted, even in days of the later Empire, on his pure descent
from AEneas and Romulus--

Unde Remnes et Quirites proque prole posterum
Romuli matrem crearet et nepotem Caesarem.

With the Ramnes, Quirites, together ancestrally proud as they drew
From Romulus down to our Caesar-last, best of that blood, of that threw.

Here is a boast that we English must be content to forgo. We may wear a
rose on St George's day, if we are clever enough to grow one. The Welsh,
I dare say, have less difficulty with the leek. But April the 23rd is not
a time of roses that we can pluck them as we pass, nor can we claim St
George as a compatriot--_Cappadocius nostras_. We have, to be sure, a few
legendary heroes, of whom King Arthur and Robin Hood are (I suppose) the
greatest; but, save in some Celtic corners of the land, we have few
fairies, and these no great matter; while, as for tutelary gods, our
springs, our wells, our groves, cliffs, mountain-sides, either never
possessed them or possess them no longer. Not of our landscape did it
happen that

The lonely mountains o'er,
And the resounding shore,
A voice of weeping heard, and loud lament;
From haunted spring and dale
Edg'd with poplar pale,
The parting Genius is with sighing sent.

--for the sufficient reason that no tutelary gods of importance were ever
here to be dispersed.

Let me press this home upon you by an illustration which I choose with
the double purpose of enforcing my argument and sending you to make
acquaintance (if you have not already made it) with one of the loveliest
poems written in our time.

In one of Pliny's letters you will find a very pleasant description of
the source of the Clitumnus, a small Umbrian river which, springing from
a rock in a grove of cypresses, descends into the Tinia, a tributary of
the Tiber. 'Have you ever,' writes Pliny to his friend Romanus--

Have you ever seen the source of the Clitumnus? I suppose not, as I
never heard you mention it. Let me advise you to go there at once. I
have just visited it and am sorry that I put off my visit so long. At
the foot of a little hill, covered with old and shady cypress trees, a
spring gushes and bursts into a number of streamlets of various size.
Breaking, so to speak, forth from its imprisonment, it expands into a
broad basin, so clear and transparent that you may count the pebbles
and lit