Then the boys went back to their trades. If the reign
of the gentleman is over, the learning and the power and culture that
has belonged to the gentleman now belongs to the craftsman. This, at
least, must be admitted to be pure gain. For one man who read and
studied and thought one hundred years ago, there are now a thousand.
Editions of good books are now issued by a hundred thousand at a time.
The Professions are still the avenues to honours. Still, as before,
the men whom the people respect are the followers of science, the
great Advocate the great Preacher, the great Engineer, the great
Surgeon, the great Dramatist, the great Novelist, the great Poet. That
the national honours no longer take the form of the Peerage will not,
I think, at this hour, be admitted to be a subject for regret by even
the stanchest Conservative.
[1893.]
I.--THE LAND OF ROMANCE
At the back of the setting sun; beyond the glories of the evening; on
the other side of the broad, mysterious ocean, lay for nine
generations of Englishmen the Land of Romance. It began--for the
English youth--to be the Land of Romance from the very day when John
Cabot discovered it for the Bristol merchants it continued to be their
Land of Romance while every sailor-captain discovered new rivers, new
gulfs, and new islands, and went in search of new north-west passages,
while the rovers, freebooters, privateers and buccaneers, put out in
their crazy, ill-found craft, to rob and slay the Spaniard; while the
mystery of the unknown still lay upon it; long after the mystery had
mostly gone out of it, save for the mystery of the Aztec; it remained
the Land of Romance when New England was fully settled and Virginia
already an old colony; it was the English Land of Romance while King
George's redcoats fought side by side with the colonials, to drive the
French out of the continent for ever.
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