Modest understatement
Sir: As a devout admirer and follower of Giles Auty's views, may I venture to query his subscription to the hoary old cliché, `the modest and good-humoured under- statement which is our finest national characteristic'? (Arts, 21 October).
Is this true of Shakespeare or Marlowe, Drake or Ralegh, or any of the great Elizabethans? (An exception may be made of Burghley, for he was a bit of a humbug.) Or of such characteristically English 'To save gossip, will you take me out on a stretcher.' figures as Dr Johnson, or Pitt in the 18th century, or Dickens in the 19th?
I am sick and tired of this middle-class, public-school cliché being put across us — historically it is very recent. Mr Auty knows Cornwall, and must know that we Celts do not subscribe to it. Why should we?
A. L. Rowse
Trenarren House, St Austell, Cornwall
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