CHAUCER. 247 



So-and-so ; that failing came in by the dilution of the 

 family blood with that of Such-a-one. In this way a 

 certain allowance is made for every aberration from some 

 assumed normal type, either in the way of reinforcement 

 or defect, and that universal desire of the human mind 

 to have everything accounted for — which makes the 

 moon responsible for the whimsies of the weathercock — 

 is cheaply gratified. But as mankind in the aggregate 

 is always wiser than any single man, because its experi- 

 ence is derived from a larger range of observation and 

 experience, and because the springs that feed it drain a 

 wider region both of time and space, there is commonly 

 some greater or smaller share of truth in all popular 

 prejudices. The meteorologists are beginning to agree 

 with the old women that the moon is an accessary before 

 the fact in our 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 freewill, and to make 

 every effort at self-direction futile, there is no inconsid- 

 erable alloy of truth in it, nevertheless. No man can 

 look into the title-deeds of what may be called his per- 

 sonal 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 indi- 

 vidual men is true also of races, and the prevailing belief 

 in a nation as to the origin of certain of its character- 

 istics has something of the same basis in facts of obser- 

 vation as the village estimate of the traits of particular 

 families. Interdum vulc/us rectum videt. 



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

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



