I would rather have a wall than any rail but a very good one of wrought-iron.  A wall is the safeguard of simplicity.  It lays a long level line among the indefinite chances of the landscape.  But never more majestic than in face of the wild sea, the wall, steadying its slanting foot upon the rock, builds in the serried ilex-wood and builds out the wave.  The sea-wall is the wall at its best.  And fine as it is on the strong coast, it is beautiful on the weak littoral and the imperilled levels of a northern beach.

That sea wall is low and long; sea-pinks grow on the salt grass that passes away into shingle at its foot.  It is at close quarters with the winter sea, when, from the low coast with its low horizon, the sky-line of sea is jagged.  Never from any height does the ocean-horizon show thus broken and battered at its very verge, but from the flat coast and the narrow world you can see the wave as far as you can see the water; and the stormy light of a clear horizon is seen to be mobile and shifting with the buoyant hillocks and their restless line.

Nowhere in Holland does there seem to be such a low sea-wall as secures many a mile of gentle English coast to the east.  The Dutch dyke has not that aspect of a lowly parapet against a tide; it springs with a look of haste and of height; and when you first run upstairs from the encumbered Dutch fields to look at the sea, there is nothing in the least like England; and even the Englishman of to-day is apt to share something of the old perversity that was minded to cast derision upon the Dutch in their encounters with the tides.

There has been some fault in the Dutch, making them subject to the slight derision of the nations who hold themselves to be more romantic, and, as it were, more slender.  We English, once upon a time, did especially flout the little nation then acting a history that proved worth the writing.  It may be no more than a brief perversity that has set a number of our writers to cheer the memory of Charles II.  Perhaps, even, it is no more than another rehearsal of that untiring success at the expense of the bourgeois.  The bourgeois would be more simple than, in fact, he is were he to stand up every time to be shocked; but, perhaps, the image of his dismay is enough to reward the fancy of those who practise the wanton art.  And, when all is done, who performs for any but an imaginary audience?  Surely those companies of spectators and of auditors are not the least of the makings of an author.  A few men and women he achieves within his books; but others does he create without, and to those figures of all illusion makes the appeal of his art.  More candid is the author who has no world, but turns that appeal inwards to his own heart.  He has at least a living hearer.