AS I sat one Sunday morning on one of the front side benches of the English Church in that little citta of the Italian Riviera whose name sounds like a joyous sigh—Alassio!—there kneeled in front of me a surpliced clergyman, so unusual a presence that it was with a mind turned to various reflections that I heard him reading the service, which he did in a rich and expressive voice.
He personified, as few men do, the majesty of manhood, and that thought inspired me with another which seemed to be its corollary, the majesty of England. For what other land could have produced so noble a son? Had he been a youth, the echo of Pope Gregory the Great's exclamation, "Non Angli sed angeli," would have reached me, but he was a man on the verge of seventy years, as powerful and robust as in his prime, untouched by Father Time or the finger of Care. And then my mind began to wander away from the church to take a general survey of the race from which this stalwart giant had sprung, and I could see his forefathers battling against the Saracens; on the fields of Flanders with Marlborough, on English soil when Cavalier and Roundhead struggled for supremacy, or in distant lands across the seas seeking fortune and, while in the search, unwittingly building up the foundations of the Empire. And then I saw them again spreading themselves over the
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