CAPTAIN BASKELETT

Our England, meanwhile, was bustling over the extinguished war, counting the cost of it, with a rather rueful eye on Manchester, and soothing the taxed by an exhibition of heroes at brilliant feasts.  Of course, the first to come home had the cream of the praises.  She hugged them in a manner somewhat suffocating to modest men, but heroism must be brought to bear upon these excesses of maternal admiration; modesty, too, when it accepts the place of honour at a public banquet, should not protest overmuch.  To be just, the earliest arrivals, which were such as reached the shores of Albion before her war was at an end, did cordially reciprocate the hug.  They were taught, and they believed most naturally, that it was quite as well to repose upon her bosom as to have stuck to their posts.  Surely there was a conscious weakness in the Spartans, who were always at pains to discipline their men in heroical conduct, and rewarded none save the stand-fasts.  A system of that sort seems to betray the sense of poverty in the article.  Our England does nothing like it.  All are welcome home to her so long as she is in want of them.  Besides, she has to please the taxpayer.  You may track a shadowy line or crazy zigzag of policy in almost every stroke of her domestic history:  either it is the forethought finding it necessary to stir up an impulse, or else dashing impulse gives a lively pull to the afterthought:  policy becomes evident somehow, clumsily very possibly.  How can she manage an enormous middle-class, to keep it happy, other than a little clumsily?  The managing of it at all is the wonder.  And not only has she to stupefy the taxpayer by a timely display of feastings and fireworks, she has to stop all that nonsense (to quote a satiated man lightened in his purse) at the right moment, about the hour when the old standfasts, who have simply been doing duty, return, poor jog-trot fellows, and a complimentary motto or two is the utmost she can present to them.  On the other hand, it is true she gives her first loves, those early birds, fully to understand that a change has come in their island mother’s mind.  If there is a balance to be righted, she leaves that business to society, and if it be the season for the gathering of society, it will be righted more or less; and if no righting is done at all, perhaps the Press will incidentally toss a leaf of laurel on a name or two:  thus in the exercise of grumbling doing good.

With few exceptions, Nevil Beauchamp’s heroes received the motto instead of the sweetmeat.  England expected them to do their duty; they did it, and she was not dissatisfied, nor should they be.  Beauchamp, at a distance from the scene, chafed with customary vehemence, concerning the unjust measure dealt to his favourites:  Captain Hardist, of the Diomed, twenty years a captain, still a captain!  Young Michell denied the cross!  Colonel Evans