E tu, pia madre di giovenchi invitti a franger glebe e rintegrar maggesi e d’ annitrenti in guerra aspri polledri, Italia madre,

madre di biade e viti e leggi eterne ed incliti arti a raddolcir la vita salve! a te i canti de l’ antica lode io rinovello.

Plaudono i monti al carme e i boschi e l’ acque de l’ Umbria verde:  in faccia a noi fumando ed anelando nuove industrie in corsa fischia il vapore.

     And thou, O pious mother of unvanquished
     Bullocks to break glebe, to restore the fallow,
     And of fierce colts for neighing in the battle: 
     Italy, mother,

     Mother of corn and vines and of eternal
     Laws and illustrious arts the life to sweeten,
     Hail, hail, all hail!  The song of ancient praises
     Renew I to thee!

     The mountains, woods and waters of green Umbria
     Applaud the song:  and here before us fuming
     And longing for new industries, a-racing
     Whistles the white steam.

(I quote from a translation by Mr E.J.  Watson, recently published by Messrs J.W.  Arrowsmith, of Bristol.)

I put it to you, Gentlemen, that, worthy as are the glories of England to be sung, this note of Carducci’s we cannot decently or honestly strike.  Great lives have been bled away into Tweed and Avon:  great spirits have been oared down the Thames to Traitor’s Gate and the Tower.  Deeds done on the Cam have found their way into history.  But I once traced the Avon to its source under Naseby battlefield, and found it issuing from the fragments of a stucco swan.  No god mounts guard over the head-water of the Thames; and the only Englishman who boldly claims a divine descent is (I understand) an impostor who runs an Agapemone.  In short we are a mixed race, and our literature is derivative.  Let us confine our pride to those virtues, not few, which are honestly ours.  A Roman noble, even to-day, has some excuse for reckoning a god in his ancestry, or at least a wolf among its wet-nurses:  but of us English even those who came over with William the Norman have the son of a tanner’s daughter for escort.  I very well remember that, the other day, writers who vindicated our hereditary House of Lords against a certain Parliament Act commonly did so on the ground that since the Reform Bill of 1832, by inclusion of all that was eminent in politics, war and commerce, the Peerage had been so changed as to know itself no longer for the same thing.  That is our practical way.

At all events, the men who made our literature had never a doubt, as they were careless to dissimulate, that they were conquering our tongue to bring it into the great European comity, the civilisation of Greece and Rome.  An Elizabethan writer, for example, would begin almost as with a formula by begging to be forgiven that he has sought to render the divine accent of Plato, the sugared music of Ovid, into our uncouth and barbarous tongue.  There may have been some mock-modesty in this, but it rested on a base of belief.  Much of the glory of English Literature was achieved by men who, with the splendour of the Renaissance in their eyes, supposed themselves to be working all the while upon pale and borrowed shadows.