specimens of the multitude, and am I not at once aware of that
instinctive antipathy, that shrinking into myself, that something like
unto scorn, of which the Englishman is accused by foreigners who casually
meet him? Peculiar to me is the effort to overcome this first impulse--an
effort which often enough succeeds. If I know myself at all, I am not an
ungenial man; and yet I am quite sure that many people who have known me
casually would say that my fault is a lack of geniality. To show my true
self, I must be in the right mood and the right circumstances--which,
after all, is merely as much as saying that I am decidedly English.



XIX.


On my breakfast table there is a pot of honey. Not the manufactured
stuff sold under that name in shops, but honey of the hive, brought to me
by a neighbouring cottager whose bees often hum in my garden. It gives,
I confess, more pleasure to my eye than to my palate; but I like to taste
of it, because it is honey.

There is as much difference, said Johnson, between a lettered and an
unlettered man as between the living and the dead; and, in a way, it was
no extravagance. Think merely how one's view of common things is
affected by literary association. What were honey to me if I knew
nothing of Hymettus and Hybla?--if my mind had no stores of poetry, no
memories of romance? Suppose me town-pent, the name might bring with it
some pleasantness of rustic odour; but of what poor significance even
that, if the country were to me mere grass and corn and vegetables, as to
the man who has never read nor wished to read. For the Poet is indeed a