put it to you, Gentlemen, that, worthy as are the glories of England to
be sung, this note of Carducci's we cannot decently or honestly strike.
Great lives have been bled away into Tweed and Avon: great spirits have
been oared down the Thames to Traitor's Gate and the Tower. Deeds done on
the Cam have found their way into history. But I once traced the Avon to
its source under Naseby battlefield, and found it issuing from the
fragments of a stucco swan. No god mounts guard over the head-water of
the Thames; and the only Englishman who boldly claims a divine descent is
(I understand) an impostor who runs an Agapemone. In short we are a mixed
race, and our literature is derivative. Let us confine our pride to those
virtues, not few, which are honestly ours. A Roman noble, even to-day,
has some excuse for reckoning a god in his ancestry, or at least a wolf
among its wet-nurses: but of us English even those who came over with
William the Norman have the son of a tanner's daughter for escort. I very
well remember that, the other day, writers who vindicated our hereditary
House of Lords against a certain Parliament Act commonly did so on the
ground that since the Reform Bill of 1832, by inclusion of all that was
eminent in politics, war and commerce, the Peerage had been so changed as
to know itself no longer for the same thing. That is our practical way.

At all events, the men who made our literature had never a doubt, as they
were careless to dissimulate, that they were conquering our tongue to
bring it into the great European comity, the civilisation of Greece and
Rome. An Elizabethan writer, for example, would begin almost as with a
formula by begging to be forgiven that he has sought to render the divine
accent of Plato, the sugared music of Ovid, into our uncouth and
barbarous tongue. There may have been some mock-modesty in this, but it
rested on a base of belief. Much of the glory of English Literature was
achieved by men who, with the splendour of the Renaissance in their eyes,
supposed themselves to be working all the while upon pale and borrowed
shadows.

Let us pass the enthusiasms of days when 'bliss was it in that dawn to be
alive' and come down to Alexander Pope and the Age of Reason. Pope at one
time proposed to write a History of English Poetry, and the draft scheme
of that History has been preserved. How does it begin? Why thus:--

ERA I.

1. School of Provence Chaucer's Visio