224 CHAUCER. 



atmospheric fluctuations. Now, although to admit this notion 

 of inherited good or ill to its fullest extent would be to abolish 

 personal character, and with it all responsibility, to abdicate 

 free-will, and to make every effort at self-direction futile, 

 there is no inconsiderable alloy of truth in it, nevertheless. 

 No man can look into the title-deeds of what may be called 

 his personal estate, his faculties, his predilections, his 

 failings whatever, in short, sets him apart as a capital I 

 without something like a shock of dread to find how much 

 of him is held in mortmain by those who, though long ago 

 mouldered away to dust, are yet fatally alive and active in 

 him for good or ill. What is true of individual men is 

 true also of races, and the prevailing belief in a nation as 

 to the origin of certain of its characteristics has something 

 of the same basis in facts of observation as the village 

 estimate of the traits of particular families. Interdum 

 vulgus rectum videt. 



We are apt, it is true, to talk rather loosely about our 

 Anglo-Saxon ancestors, and to attribute to them in a vague 

 way all the pith of our institutions and the motive power 

 of our progress. For my own part, I think there is such a 

 thing as being too Anglo-Saxon, and the warp and woof 

 of the English national character, though undoubtedly two 

 elements mainly predominate in it, is quite too complex for 

 us to pick out a strand here and there, and affirm that the 

 body of the fabric is of this or that. Our present concern 

 with the Saxons is chiefly a literary one ; but it leads to a 

 study of general characteristics. What, then, so far as we 

 can make it out, seems to be their leading mental feature ? 

 Plainly, understanding, common-sense a faculty which 

 never carries its possessor very high in creative literature, 

 though it may make him great as an acting and even think 

 ing man. Take Dr. Johnson as an instance. The Saxon, 

 as it appears to me, has never shown any capacity for art, 

 nay, commonly commits ugly blunders when he is tempted 

 in that direction. He has made the best working institu 

 tions and the ugliest monuments among the children of men. 

 He is wanting in taste, which is as much as to say that he 



