aps by the
relics of better things of the past, but largely at least by the
presence of much worse things in the present. The worst things kept out
the best things of the eighteenth century. The ground was occupied by
legal fictions; by a godless Erastian church and a powerless Hanoverian
king. Its realities were an aristocracy of Regency dandies, in costumes
made to match Brighton Pavilion; a paganism not frigid but florid. It
was a touch of this aristocratic waste in Fox that prevented that great
man from being a glorious exception. It is therefore well for us to
realise that there is something in history which we did not experience;
and therefore probably something in Americans that we do not understand.
There was this idealism at the very beginning of their individualism.
There was a note of heroic publicity and honourable poverty which
lingers in the very name of Cincinnati.

But I have another and special reason for noting this historical fact;
the fact that we English never made anything upon the model of a
capitol, while we can match anybody with the model of a cathedral. It is
far from improbable that the latter model may again be a working model.
For I have myself felt, naturally and for a long time, a warm sympathy
with both those past ideals, which seem to some so incompatible. I have
felt the attraction of the red cap as well as the red cross, of the
Marseillaise as well as the Magnificat. And even when they were in
furious conflict I have never altogether lost my sympathy for either.
But in the conflict between the Republic[1] and the Church, the point
often made against the Church seems to me much more of a point against
the Republic. It is emphatically the Republic and not the Church that I
venerate as something beautiful but belonging to the past. In fact I
feel exactly the same sort of sad respect for the republican ideal that
many mid-Victorian free-thinkers felt for the religious ideal. The most
sincere poets of that period were largely divided between those who
insisted, like Arnold and Clough, that Christianity might be a ruin, but
after all it must be treated as a picturesque ruin; and those, like
Swinburne, who insisted that it might be a picturesque ruin, but after
all it must be treated as a ruin. But surely their own pagan temple of
political liberty is now much more of a ruin than the other; and I fancy
I am one of the few who still take off their hats in that ruined temple.
That is why I wen