fi8 POPE, 



ing pays to elegance of manner and savoir-faire, nor what all 

 awkward sense of inferiority it feels in the presence of an ac 

 complished worldliness. The code of society is stronger with 

 most persons than than of Sinai, and many a man who would 

 not scruple to thrust his fingers in his neighbour s pocket would 

 forego green peas rather than use his knife as a shovel. The 

 submission with which the ( greater number surrender their 

 natural likings for the acquired taste of what for the moment is 

 called the World is a highly curious phenomenon, and, however 

 destructive of originality, is the main safeguard of society and 

 nurse of civility. Anyone who has witnessed the torments of an 

 honest citizen in a foreign gallery before some hideous martyr 

 dom which he feels it his duty to admire, though it be hateful to 

 him as nightmare, may well doubt whether the gridiron of the 

 saint were hotter than that of the sinner. It is only a great 

 mind or a strong character that knows how to respect its own 

 provincialism and can dare to be in fashion with itself. The 

 bewildered clown with his Am I Giles? or am I not? was but 

 a type of the average man who finds himself uniformed, drilled, 

 and keeping step, whether he will or no, with the company into 

 which destiny or chance has drafted him, and which is march 

 ing him inexorably away from everything that made him com 

 fortable. 



The insularity of England, while it fostered pride and reserve, 

 entailed also that sensitiveness to ridicule which haunts pride 

 like an evil genius. The English, says Barclay, writing half a 

 century before the Restoration, have for the most part grave 

 minds and withdrawn, as it were, into themselves for counsel ; 

 they wonderfully admire themselves and the manners, genius, 

 and spirit of their own nation. In salutation or in writing they 

 endure not (unless haply imbued with foreign manners) to 

 descend to those words of imaginary servitude which the refine 

 ment (blandities) of ages hath invented. * Yet their fondness 

 of foreign fashions had long been the butt of native satirists. 

 Everyone remembers Portia s merry picture of the English 

 lord: How oddly he is suited! I think he bought his doublet 

 in Italy, his round hose in France, his bonnet in Germany, and 

 his behaviour everywhere. But while she laughs at his bung 

 ling efforts to make himself a cosmopolite in externals, she hints 

 at the persistency of his inward Anglicism : He hath neither 

 Latin, French, nor Italian. In matters of taste the Anglo- 

 Saxon mind seem always to have felt a painful distrust of itself, 



* Barclaii Satyricon, p. 382. Barclay had lived in France. 



