what that word means to-day.  He was as egalitarian as St. Francis, and as independent as Robin Hood.  Like that other yeoman in the ballad, he bore in hand a mighty bow; what some of his enemies would have called a long bow.  But though he sometimes overshot the mark of truth, he never shot away from it, like Froude.  His account of that sixteenth century in which the mediaeval civilisation ended, is not more and not less picturesque than Froude’s:  the difference is in the dull detail of truth.  That crisis was not the foundling of a strong Tudor monarchy, for the monarchy almost immediately perished; it was the founding of a strong class holding all the capital and land, for it holds them to this day.  Cobbett would have asked nothing better than to bend his mediaeval bow to the cry of “St. George for Merry England,” for though he pointed to the other and uglier side of the Waterloo medal, he was patriotic; and his premonitions were rather against Blucher than Wellington.  But if we take that old war-cry as his final word (and he would have accepted it) we must note how every term in it points away from what the modern plutocrats call either progress or empire.  It involves the invocation of saints, the most popular and the most forbidden form of mediaevalism.  The modern Imperialist no more thinks of St. George in England than he thinks of St. John in St. John’s Wood.  It is nationalist in the narrowest sense; and no one knows the beauty and simplicity of the Middle Ages who has not seen St. George’s Cross separate, as it was at Crecy or Flodden, and noticed how much finer a flag it is than the Union Jack.  And the word “merry” bears witness to an England famous for its music and dancing before the coming of the Puritans, the last traces of which have been stamped out by a social discipline utterly un-English.  Not for two years, but for ten decades Cobbett has been in prison; and his enemy, the “efficient” foreigner, has walked about in the sunlight, magnificent, and a model for men.  I do not think that even the Prussians ever boasted about “Merry Prussia.”

VI—­Hamlet and the Danes

In the one classic and perfect literary product that ever came out of Germany—­I do not mean “Faust,” but Grimm’s Fairy Tales—­there is a gorgeous story about a boy who went through a number of experiences without learning how to shudder.  In one of them, I remember, he was sitting by the fireside and a pair of live legs fell down the chimney and walked about the room by themselves.  Afterwards the rest fell down and joined up; but this was almost an anti-climax.  Now that is very charming, and full of the best German domesticity.  It suggests truly what wild adventures the traveller can find by stopping at home.  But it also illustrates in various ways how that great German influence on England, which is the matter of these essays, began in good things and gradually turned to bad.  It