never deflected by a hairsbreadth. I doubt if any modern English group of ministers could behave in this way, so inflexibly and with such restraint. But that was the way in which the Whigs ruled the country. In England to-day there is no coherent body of this sort.
This story of Queen Victoria and a group of well-trained politicians is very trivial. It belongs to the frippery of government: how to deal with an awkward incident, of which the importance was more social than political. But the interest is to notice how a score of men with a certain sort of training do in fact deal with such situations. It belongs to the art of preventing minor difficulties from growing into great crises.
It is curious how detached incidents remain in memory. I can vividly remember the old bobbin man who supplied my parents’ household with kindling for the coal fires during the first half of the eighteen-seventies. I expect that these bobbins ought to have been called “fagots,” but in the villages of East Kent we called them “bobbins.” He was a curious old man, completely without education and earning a scanty living. He was dressed in corduroys, of an antiquity defying any exact estimate of date. He cut the scrub undergrowth in the woods near Canterbury, about seventeen miles away from us. He then chopped the wood into the required lengths, and tied the sticks up into parcels — each parcel, or bobbin, being about the amount required to light a fire. He came through the village about once a fortnight, or once in three weeks, with a large cart piled high with bobbins. As he passed, he called out, “Bobbins! Bobbins!” in a curious, harshly rhythmical voice which stays in memory after more than half a century.
The horse was even more decrepit than the man — an old, worn-out cart horse. The pace of the procession was about one and three-quarter miles an hour. They — the man walking beside the horse — plodded along, unresting and untiring, so near their end and yet seemingly timeless and eternal. He, his horse, Queen Victoria, and her cabinet ministers, all belong to the essential stuff of English History. So does my father, the thoroughly countrified vicar of the parish, as I can now see him half a century ago chatting to the old bobbin man. They were on very friendly terms. Unfortunately only one fragment of their conversation survives. It was the old bobbin man who said: “There are some as goes rootling and tearing about. But, Lor’ bless you, sir, I gets to Saturday night as soon as any of ’em.” That is an authentic bit of village speech, nigh sixty years ago, and the speakers have all passed into their final Saturday night, together with their whole world of ways of life.
III
While on the topic of life in a country vicarage, another visual memory flashes upon me: there is an Archbishop of Canterbury, tall, commanding,
