shadows
creep on from the sea, film after film!--and now they have reached the
ivy that mantles round the castle of The Bruce. Are you acquainted with
Barbour?"

"Well," I said; "a spirited, fine old fellow, who loved his country and
did much for it. I could once repeat all his chosen passages. Do you
remember how he describes King Robert's rencounter with the English
knight?"

My companion sat up erect, and, clenching his fist, began repeating the
passage, with a power and animation that seemed to double its inherent
energy and force.

"Glorious old Barbour!" ejaculated he, when he had finished the
description; "many a heart has beat all the higher when the bale-fires
were blazing, through the tutorage of thy noble verses! Blind Harry,
too--what has not his country owed to him!"

"Ah, they have long since been banished from our popular literature," I
said; "and yet Blind Harry's 'Wallace,' as Hailes tells us, was at one
time the very Bible of the Scotch. But love of country seems to be
getting old-fashioned among us, and we have become philosophic enough to
set up for citizens of the world."

"All cold pretence," rejoined my companion; "an effect of that small
wisdom we have just been decrying. Cosmopolitism, as we are accustomed
to define it, can be no virtue of the present age, nor yet of the next,
nor perhaps for centuries to come. Even when it shall have attained to
its best, and when it may be most safely indulged in, it is according
to the nature of man, that, instead of running counter to the love of
country, it should exist as but a wider diffusion of the feeling, and
form, as it were, a wider circle round it. It is absurdity itself to
oppose the love of our country to that of our race."

"Do I rightly understand you?" I said. "You look forward to a time when
the patriot may safely expand into the citizen of the world; but, in the
present age, he would do well, you think, to confine his energies within
the inner circle of country."

"Decidedly," he rejoined; "man should love his species at all times,
but it is ill with him if, in times like the present, he loves not his
country more. The spirit of war and aggression is yet abroad--there are
laws to be established, rights to be defended, invaders to be repulsed,
tyrants to be deposed. And who but the patriot is equal to these things?
We are not yet done with the Bruces, the Wallaces, the Tells, the
Washingtons--yes, the Washingtons, whether they fight f