But I check myself.  Perhaps this England of my affections is half visionary—­a dream in which things are connected according to my well-fed, lazy mood, and not at all by the multitudinous links of graver, sadder fact, such as belong everywhere to the story of human labour.  Well, well, the illusions that began for us when we were less acquainted with evil have not lost their value when we discern them to be illusions.  They feed the ideal Better, and in loving them still, we strengthen the precious habit of loving something not visibly, tangibly existent, but a spiritual product of our visible tangible selves.

I cherish my childish loves—­the memory of that warm little nest where my affections were fledged.  Since then I have learned to care for foreign countries, for literatures foreign and ancient, for the life of Continental towns dozing round old cathedrals, for the life of London, half sleepless with eager thought and strife, with indigestion or with hunger; and now my consciousness is chiefly of the busy, anxious metropolitan sort.  My system responds sensitively to the London weather-signs, political, social, literary; and my bachelor’s hearth is imbedded where by much craning of head and neck I can catch sight of a sycamore in the Square garden:  I belong to the “Nation of London.”  Why?  There have been many voluntary exiles in the world, and probably in the very first exodus of the patriarchal Aryans—­for I am determined not to fetch my examples from races whose talk is of uncles and no fathers—­some of those who sallied forth went for the sake of a loved companionship, when they would willingly have kept sight of the familiar plains, and of the hills to which they had first lifted up their eyes.

III.

HOW WE ENCOURAGE RESEARCH.

The serene and beneficent goddess Truth, like other deities whose disposition has been too hastily inferred from that of the men who have invoked them, can hardly be well pleased with much of the worship paid to her even in this milder age, when the stake and the rack have ceased to form part of her ritual.  Some cruelties still pass for service done in her honour:  no thumb-screw is used, no iron boot, no scorching of flesh; but plenty of controversial bruising, laceration, and even lifelong maiming.  Less than formerly; but so long as this sort of truth-worship has the sanction of a public that can often understand nothing in a controversy except personal sarcasm or slanderous ridicule, it is likely to continue.  The sufferings of its victims are often as little regarded as those of the sacrificial pig offered in old time, with what we now regard as a sad miscalculation of effects.

One such victim is my old acquaintance Merman.