416 Mr. Sidney Lea [May 1J > 



WEEKLY EVENING MEETING, 

 Friday, May 11, 1900. 



The Hon. Sib James Stirling, M.A. LL.D., Manager 

 and Vice-President, in the Chair. 



Sidney Lee, Esq. 



Shakespeare and True Patriotism. 



Mr. Lee said the suggestion had been made that an English national 

 fete day should be instituted, but the champions of the proposed 

 festival had not yet perfected their programme. Some urged that 

 a fitting date would be April 23, the day consecrated in the calen- 

 dars of the Roman and Greek churches to St. George, who was 

 popularly reckoned the tutelary saint of England. St. George had 

 been identified with two shadowy figures in history. The single 

 fact about them that was uncontradicted was that neither of them 

 was an Englishman or had any connection with England. They 

 were both natives of Cappadocia, in Asia Minor, some 1500 years 

 ago. Gibbon, perhaps, wrongly identified the tutelary saint with a 

 disreputable St. George of Cappadocia — " an odious stranger," Gibbon 

 called him — who, having exhausted the varied possibilities of the 

 careers of army contractor and tax-gatherer, ventured on the experi- 

 ment of becoming an Archbishop, but his flock marked their resent- 

 ment at this change of profession by tearing him limb from limb. 

 The reputed encounter with the dragon was mythical, and it seemed 

 eccentric to associate with cobwebs of romantic myth the annual 

 celebration of the greatness of a nation which prided itself on its 

 practical common sense and love of solid fact. It was a happy 

 coincidence that had identified St. George's day with the birth of 

 a hero by no means fabulous, William Shakespeare. If at the be- 

 ginning of a new century a patron saint was chosen anew, and the 

 choice lay between a mythical native of Cappadocia and Shakespeare, 

 the native of Stratford-on-Avon, the straitest of cosmopolitan in- 

 tellects among us could hardly defy the sentiment that gave the 

 preference to the Englishman. The cosmopolitan might argue that 

 Shakespeare was the property of the world. The Germans treated 

 Shakespeare as one of themselves, and the only complaint that they 

 had been known of late years to make of him was that he had the 

 bad taste to bo born an Englishman. In France, too, the elder 

 Dumas gave pointed expression to his faith in Shakespeare's pre- 

 eminence in the pantheon not of a single nation, but of the universe. 



