English not once or twice only. I doubt if he has ever assailed or advised them without due cause: in one point above all he has done them most loyal and liberal service; he has striven to purge them of the pestilence of provincial thought and tradition, of blind theory and brute opinion, of all that hereditary policy of prejudice which substitutes self-esteem for self-culture, self-worship for self-knowledge; which clogs and encrusts all powers and all motions of the mind with a hard husk of mechanical conceit. And here, heaven knows, in his dull dumb way the Briton stands ahead of all men, towers above all men in stolid and sublime solitude, a massive, stupid, inarticulate god and priest in one; his mute and majestic autolatry is a deeper and more radical religion than the self-love of other nations, the more vocal vanities of France or America, In the stone walls and iron girders of this faith our champion has done what a man may to make a breach; and the weapon was well chosen, the brand of provinciality, wherewith to stamp and mark that side of the double-faced head of Dagon which looks towards us with English features. But, to use his own term, there are two notes of provinciality perceptible, one or other, in most criticism of foreign things; error in praise and error in dispraise. He could have prescribed for the soul-sick British Philistine, "sick of self-love," no better method of cure than study and culture of the French spirit, of its flexible intelligence and critical ambition, its many-sided faith in perfection, in possible excellence and ideal growth outward and upward, and the single-hearted love of all these which goes hand in hand with that faith. Faith in light