little of the thing called history; and if they thought at all of such
dead catchwords as the "Celtic fringe" for a description of Ireland, it
was to doubt whether we were worthy to kiss the hem of her garment. If
there be still any Englishman who thinks such language extravagant, this
chapter is written to enlighten him.

In the last two chapters I have sketched in outline the way in which
England, partly by historical accident, but partly also by false
philosophy, was drawn into the orbit of Germany, the centre of whose
circle was already at Berlin. I need not recapitulate the causes at all
fully here. Luther was hardly a heresiarch for England, though a hobby
for Henry VIII. But the negative Germanism of the Reformation, its drag
towards the north, its quarantine against Latin culture, was in a sense
the beginning of the business. It is well represented in two facts; the
barbaric refusal of the new astronomical calendar merely because it was
invented by a Pope, and the singular decision to pronounce Latin as if
it were something else, making it not a dead language but a new
language. Later, the part played by particular royalties is complex and
accidental; "the furious German" came and passed; the much less
interesting Germans came and stayed. Their influence was negative but
not negligible; they kept England out of that current of European life
into which the Gallophil Stuarts might have carried her. Only one of the
Hanoverians was actively German; so German that he actually gloried in
the name of Briton, and spelt it wrong. Incidentally, he lost America.
It is notable that all those eminent among the real Britons, who spelt
it right, respected and would parley with the American Revolution,
however jingo or legitimist they were; the romantic conservative Burke,
the earth-devouring Imperialist Chatham, even, in reality, the jog-trot
Tory North. The intractability was in the Elector of Hanover more than
in the King of England; in the narrow and petty German prince who was