Scandinavia, and of Spain. Through America, England is speaking to the
world.

"Sketches of Saxondom may be of interest even upon humbler grounds:
the development of the England of Elizabeth is to be found, not in the
Britain of Victoria, but in half the habitable globe. If two small
islands are by courtesy styled 'Great,' America, Australia, India,
must form a 'Greater Britain.'"

He wrote of this passage in his Memoir:

'The preface of _Greater Britain_, in which the title is justified and
explained, is the best piece of work of my life. It states the
doctrine on which our rule should be based--remembered in Canada--
forgotten in South Africa--the true as against the bastard
Imperialism. As will be seen from it, I included in my "Greater
Britain" our Magna Graecia of the United States. As late as 1880,
twelve years after the publication of my book, not only was the title
"Greater Britain" often used for the English world--as I used it--but,
speaking at the Lotus Club of New York, Mr. Whitelaw Reid used it
specially of the United States. Tom Hughes, he declared, "led a
pioneer English colony to this Greater Britain, to seek here a fuller
expansion." It is contracting an idea which, as its author, I think
lofty and even noble, to use "Greater Britain" only of the British
Empire, as is now done.'

The touch of enthusiasm in this book lifted his writing to its highest
plane. He himself was specially proud of the praise which P. G. Hamerton
bestowed on the landscape passages: [Footnote: See Appendix, pp. 72, 73.]
and they have the quality, which his grandfather schooled him in, of being