is nationalist in the narrowest sense; and no one knows the beauty and
simplicity of the Middle Ages who has not seen St. George's Cross
separate, as it was at Creçy or Flodden, and noticed how much finer a
flag it is than the Union Jack. And the word "merry" bears witness to an
England famous for its music and dancing before the coming of the
Puritans, the last traces of which have been stamped out by a social
discipline utterly un-English. Not for two years, but for ten decades
Cobbett has been in prison; and his enemy, the "efficient" foreigner,
has walked about in the sunlight, magnificent, and a model for men. I
do not think that even the Prussians ever boasted about "Merry Prussia."



VI--_Hamlet and the Danes_


In the one classic and perfect literary product that ever came out of
Germany--I do not mean "Faust," but Grimm's Fairy Tales--there is a
gorgeous story about a boy who went through a number of experiences
without learning how to shudder. In one of them, I remember, he was
sitting by the fireside and a pair of live legs fell down the chimney
and walked about the room by themselves. Afterwards the rest fell down
and joined up; but this was almost an anti-climax. Now that is very
charming, and full of the best German domesticity. It suggests truly
what wild adventures the traveller can find by stopping at home. But it
also illustrates in various ways how that great German influence on
England, which is the matter of these essays, began in good things and
gradually turned to bad. It began as a literary influence, in the lurid
tales of Hoffmann, the tale of "Sintram," and so on; the revisualising
of the dark background of forest behind our European cities. That old