Horsa were not even legendary, for they left no legend. Anybody could
see what was obligatory on the representative of Arthur; he was bound to
be chivalrous, that is, to be European. But nobody could imagine what
was obligatory on the representative of Horsa, unless it were to be
horsy. That was perhaps the only part of the Anglo-Saxon programme that
the contemporary English really carried out. Then, in the very real
decline from Cobbett to Cobden (that is, from a broad to a narrow
manliness and good sense) there had grown up the cult of a very curious
kind of peace, to be spread all over the world not by pilgrims, but by
pedlars. Mystics from the beginning had made vows of peace--but they
added to them vows of poverty. Vows of poverty were not in the
Cobdenite's line. Then, again, there was the positive praise of Prussia,
to which steadily worsening case the Carlyleans were already committed.
But beyond these, there was something else, a spirit which had more
infected us as a whole. That spirit was the spirit of Hamlet. We gave
the grand name of "evolution" to a notion that things do themselves. Our
wealth, our insularity, our gradual loss of faith, had so dazed us that
the old Christian England haunted us like a ghost in whom we could not
quite believe. An aristocrat like Palmerston, loving freedom and hating
the upstart despotism, must have looked on at its cold brutality not
without that ugly question which Hamlet asked himself--am I a coward?

It cannot be
But I am pigeon-livered and lack gall
To make oppression bitter; or 'ere this
I should have fatted all the region kites
With this slave's offal.

We made dumb our anger and our honour; but it has not brought us peace.