waste of so much of our effort and the weight of the many-coloured
mantle of time that drags so redundantly about us, this natural
accommodation of the English spirit, this frequent extraordinary beauty
of the English aspect, this finest saturation of the English
intelligence by its most immediate associations, tasting as they mainly
do of the long past, this ideal image of English youth, in a word, at
once radiant and reflective, are things that appeal to us as
delightfully exhibitional beyond a doubt, yet as drawn, to the last
fibre, from the very wealth of our own conscience and the very force of
our own history. We haven't, for such an instance of our genius, to
reach out to strange places or across other, and otherwise productive,
tracts; the exemplary instance himself has well-nigh as a matter of
course reached and revelled, for that is exactly our way in proportion
as we feel ourselves clear. But the kind of experience so entailed, of
contribution so gathered, is just what we wear easiest when we have been
least stinted of it, and what our English use of makes perhaps our
vividest reference to our thick-growing native determinants."

Rupert Brooke, at any rate, the charmed commentator may well keep before
him, simply did all the usual English things--under the happy provision
of course that he found them in his way at their best; and it was
exactly most delightful in him that no inordinate expenditure, no
anxious extension of the common plan, as "liberally" applied all about
him, had been incurred or contrived to predetermine his distinction. It
is difficult to express on the contrary how peculiar a value attached to
his having simply "come in" for the general luck awaiting any English
youth who may not be markedly inapt for the traditional chances. He
could in fact easily strike those who most appreciated him as giving
such an account of the usual English things--to repeat the form of my
allusion to them--as seemed to address you to them, in their very