1 84 CHAUCER. 



direction. He has made the best working institutions and the 

 ugliest monuments among the children of men. He is wanting 

 in taste, which is as much as to say that he has no true sense of 

 proportion. His genius is his solidity an admirable founda 

 tion of national character. He is healthy, in no clanger of 

 liver-complaint, with digestive apparatus of amazing force and 

 precision. He- is the best farmer and best grazier among men, 

 raises the biggest crops and the fattest cattle, and consumes 

 Droportionate quantities of both. He settles and sticks like a 

 diluvial deposit on the warm, low-lying levels, physical and 

 moral. He has a prodigious talent, to use our Yankee phrase, 

 vi staying put. You cannot move him; he and rich earth have a 

 natural sympathy of cohesion. Not quarrelsome, but with in 

 defatigable durability of fight in him, sound of stomach, and not 

 too refined in nervous texture, he is capable of indefinitely pro 

 longed punishment, with a singularly obtuse sense of propriety 

 in acknowledging himself beaten. Among all races perhaps 

 none has shown so acute a sense of the side on which its bread 

 is buttered, and so great a repugnance for having fine phrases 

 take the place of the butyraceous principle. They invented the 

 words * humbug, cant/ sham/ gag/ soft-sodder/ * flapdoddle/ 

 and other disenchanting formulas, whereby the devil of false 

 hood and unreality gets his effectual apage Satana ! 



An imperturbable perception of the real relations of things is 

 the Saxon s leading quality no sense whatever, or at best small, 

 of the ideal in him. He has no notion that two and two ever 

 make five, which is the problem the poet often has to solve. 

 Understanding, that is, equilibrium of mind, intellectual good 

 digestion, this, with unclogged biliary ducts, makes him men 

 tally and physically what we call a very fixed fact ; but you shall 

 not find a poet in a hundred thousand square miles in many 

 prosperous centuries of such. But one element of incalculable 

 importance we have not mentioned. In this homely nature, the 

 idea of God, and of a simple and direct relation between the 

 All-Father and his children, is deeply rooted. There, above 

 all, will he have honesty and simplicity ; less than anything else 

 will he have the sacramental wafer that beautiful emblem of 

 our dependence on Him who giveth the daily bread ; less than 

 anything will he have this smeared with that Barmecide butter 

 of fair words. This is the lovely and noble side of his character. 

 Indignation at this will make him forget crops and cattle ; and 

 this, after so many centuries, will give him at last a poet in the 

 monk of Eisleben, who shall cut deep on the memory of man- 



