They were nearly impregnable in their island; they were not bellicose.
They made and sold for all the world. Whether the very different future
which we are now entering is to be laid to their door or to our own,
that generation will still remain one of the principal things in English
history, like the Elizabethan generation, or the group of men who
organized the Seven Years' War, or the group of men who fought in the
Peninsula. And of that generation the note of health and of stability is
represented by its humour. I am not sure that of all things educational
to young men with no personal memory of that time, and especially to
young men with no family tradition of it to reflect it in their books
and their furniture; and--this yet more particularly--to young men born
out of England yet claiming communion with England, the Anglo-Indians
and the Colonials--I am not sure, I say, that the thing most educational
to these would not be some hundred of Charles Keene's drawings, for
therein they would find what it was that gave them the power and the
wealth that can hardly be defended unless its traditions are continued.
Note how Victorian England dealt with the humour of a Volunteer review;
note how it dealt with the humour of excessive wealth; and note how it
dealt with the humour of schools and of Dons. One might almost define it
by negations. There is in all of it no--but here I lack a word.
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