Unde Remnes et Quirites proque prole posterum
     Romuli matrem crearet et nepotem Caesarem.

  With the Ramnes, Quirites, together ancestrally proud as they drew
  From Romulus down to our Caesar-last, best of that blood, of that threw.

Here is a boast that we English must be content to forgo.  We may wear a rose on St George’s day, if we are clever enough to grow one.  The Welsh, I dare say, have less difficulty with the leek.  But April the 23rd is not a time of roses that we can pluck them as we pass, nor can we claim St George as a compatriot—­Cappadocius nostras.  We have, to be sure, a few legendary heroes, of whom King Arthur and Robin Hood are (I suppose) the greatest; but, save in some Celtic corners of the land, we have few fairies, and these no great matter; while, as for tutelary gods, our springs, our wells, our groves, cliffs, mountain-sides, either never possessed them or possess them no longer.  Not of our landscape did it happen that

     The lonely mountains o’er,
     And the resounding shore,
     A voice of weeping heard, and loud lament;
     From haunted spring and dale
     Edg’d with poplar pale,
     The parting Genius is with sighing sent.

—­for the sufficient reason that no tutelary gods of importance were ever here to be dispersed.

Let me press this home upon you by an illustration which I choose with the double purpose of enforcing my argument and sending you to make acquaintance (if you have not already made it) with one of the loveliest poems written in our time.

In one of Pliny’s letters you will find a very pleasant description of the source of the Clitumnus, a small Umbrian river which, springing from a rock in a grove of cypresses, descends into the Tinia, a tributary of the Tiber.  ‘Have you ever,’ writes Pliny to his friend Romanus—­

Have you ever seen the source of the Clitumnus?  I suppose not, as I never heard you mention it.  Let me advise you to go there at once.  I have just visited it and am sorry that I put off my visit so long.  At the foot of a little hill, covered with old and shady cypress trees, a spring gushes and bursts into a number of streamlets of various size.  Breaking, so to speak, forth from its imprisonment, it expands into a broad basin, so clear and transparent that you may count the pebbles and little pieces of money which are thrown into it.  From this point the force and weight of the water, rather than the slope of the ground, hurry it onward.  What was a mere spring becomes a noble river, broad enough to allow vessels to pass each other as they sail with or against the stream.  The current is so strong, though the ground is level, that barges of beam, as they go down, require no assistance of oars; while to go up is as much as can be done with oars and long poles....  The banks are clothed with abundant ash and poplar, so distinctly reflected in the transparent