68 A GARDEN DIARY 
What an odd convention it is, when one 
thinks of it, that habit of embodying a country 
in an individual! Considered seriously the whole 
contention is absurd. To talk of a nation as 
a person is to talk sheer nonsense. If one 
handles the idea a little it tumbles to pieces in 
one’s fingers. The fiction of unity resolves 
itself into a mere vortex of atoms, all moving in 
different ways, and moreover with a different 
general drift in each successive generation. As 
a matter of fact I doubt whether Englishmen, 
who are nothing if not practical, ever do think 
of their own country as an individual, unless 
one of them happens to be called upon to design 
a coin or a cartoon. The whole idea is extra- 
neous, a survival from classical days, and the 
lumbering absurdities which are now and then 
dragged about the streets only go to prove how 
far from the genius of the people such repre- 
sentations really are. 
Perhaps it is because I am not English that 
I find myself falling so readily into the trick. 
There was a time,—not a very recent one— 
when I thought of England habitually in that 
light, and in the most truculent fashion possible. 
In my eyes she stood visibly out as the Great 
Bully, the Supreme Tyrant, red with the blood 
of Ireland and Irish heroes. It was always 
she and her then; indeed it was only by keeping 
up the fiction of an incarnate Saxondom that 
