Souvenirs 
element of quiet strength in England which 
furnished no subjeéts for novels, no excitements for 
lawyer or judge or politician, no romance for poets, 
but kept the country orderly and industrious. 
This aspect of England’s career gathered for 
me around that genealogy, to suggest (when I 
was not at all looking for such a thing) a sort of 
social origin for John Smith’s life. It linked 
him up with the rustic English, the able nobodies 
who had dwelt in their villages and mowed their 
hay and thatched their barns for centuries. He 
came from the procession of men who were 
emphatically the English—the men whose value 
Evelyn and Gilbert White and Arthur Young 
could appreciate. “‘ Rosy-faced,” thin, grey- 
eyed, quiet—they were perhaps more than a 
trifle slow of wit, not to say stupid; yet they 
knew England in all her fields—and not Gray in 
his Elegy spoke too highly of the sort of men 
they were. It cannot have been otherwise. 
Novelists may have left evil accounts of the 
eighteenth-century English; but you cannot 
have a John Smith with no traditions behind 
him; and when you see a man like Richard 
Young you may fairly discern in him what the 
character of his country-side must have been 
through many generations. 
A different fa€tor in my uncle’s make-up 1s 
suggested by another memento. From the 
169 
