amusement of children, is no bar to their comparative literary merits; for "The dignity of the persons represented has as little to do with the correctness of poetry as with the correctness of painting. We prefer a gypsy by Reynolds to his Majesty's head on a sign-post, and a Borderer by Scott to a senator by Addison," says Macaulay.

But Kipling neither paints like Reynolds nor writes like Addison; hence his characters have little to recommend them, barring the fact of their being mainly shaggy heads on sign-posts.

Against these charges there is, in our humble judgment, but one vindication that can be set up, and that vindication must be by Mr. Kipling himself, and the defense must be a future production in verse worthy of a permanent place in liter

ature.

CHAPTER I.

TWO ENGLISHMEN-AN AMERICAN AND A BRITON.

This royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, this demi-paradise.

William Shakespeare, concerning England.

Time was when it was praise and boast enough
In every clime, and travel where we might,
That we were born her children; praise enough
To fill the ambition of a private man
That Chatham's language was his mother-tongue,
And Wolfe's great name compatriot with his own.
William Cowper.

Thrones of the continent! isles of the sea!
Yours are the garlands of peace we entwine;
Welcome, once more to the land of the free,

Shadowed alike by the palm and the pine;
Softly they murmur, the palm and the pine,
"Hushed is our strife in the land of the free;"

Over your children the branches entwine,

до

Thrones of the continent! isles of the sea!
Oliver Wendell Holmes' Welcome to the Nations.

attempt to account for two strong British characteristics-national prejudice against Americans and individual conceit-would of themselves constitute a modest volume. The former is no doubt a part of the price of religious liberty paid by the Pilgrim Fathers for separating themselves from the Church of England. But whatever

its origin, all hail the "era of good feeling" momentous events have so recently ushered in, so promising of a normal relation between kindred peoples. Persecuted for conscience sake, they fled, but as they fled, many of them flung back on the ocean breeze to their persecutors as their native land receded a farewell taunt that, soon following after, crossed the seas, and has bid defiance to the lapse of time: "Farewell, Babylon! Farewell, Rome!" And although her wandering children were missed at many a fireside at home, and "Dear Old England" was loved then by her unsubmissive children, as loved to-day by millions of their descendants, yet love and hate have been rival passions with the baser often prevailing through more than eight generations. The rude manners our forefathers soon acquired on our uncultured shore, no doubt, tended greatly to foster prejudice in a land of wealth, aristocracy, and learning, such as England; later, the superiority of our troops in colonial wars intensified it; while still later the many acts of parliaments and congresses, of pen and press, of individual voice, and public demonstration on both sides of the Atlantic, culminating in our national independence, fanned and heated that prejudice into a hatred which, on the part of England, spread

TWO ENGLISHMEN.

27

quite naturally to almost every subject of the realm.

Prior to the Civil War, which also had an unhappy effect on whatever kindly regards quite fifty years of peace had mutually produced. Nathanial Hawthorne wrote: "If an Englishman were individually acquainted with every one of our twentyfive millions of Americans, and liked every one of them, and believed that each man of those millions was a Christian, honest, upright, and kind, he would, no doubt, despise, and hate them in the aggregate, however he might love them as individuals." Dr. Collyer, one of Chicago's great divines, after forty years residence in America, speaking as one who knows the Americans "like a book," "as a working man in the shops for about nine years, as a minister in two great cities and a lecturer all the way between the oceans," once said that, except during the late rebellion, the American who hated England was an exception to the rule among our citizens." After expressing himself in the most kindly way concerning the mother country, the Doctor testifies to England's active, energetic, sleepless, ceaseless selfishness in the following language: "Every Englishman is an island,' Novalis says; and that I think is the trouble; he is a Briton wherever he goes, and he tries to stay one

with all his might, counting her little finger of whom he was born more than the loins of the Republic in which he lives and thrives, I know also from my own life, and from what one easily learns in visiting England, and staying, as I do, among those who emigrate, that she is bent by all means, and always has been, on turning the tide of emigration from these shores towards her own colonies, aiding and inspiring them to go there, and warning them in a thousand ways not to come here; so they go to boom the colonies, and we must not blame the magnificent old mother for this concern about her children." But what Americans do hate is splendidly summed up by James Harrison Wilson: "It may be truthfully asserted that Americans do not hate England, the home of their race. They hate the insulting, domineering, aggressive policy of the British government. They hate the supercilious and patronizing airs, the intolerance and self-sufficiency, and the arrogance and superiority of the class which controls and represents the government, and which has always given it its character before the world." We Americans, however, must not forget that as our empire. widens, and our interests multiply, some of which are already so gigantic and bold as almost to threaten government now, and lawless subject