ROBERTSON ON ENGLISH CHARACTERISTICS.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."] SIR,-In an editorial comment on a letter published in the Spectator on November 1st, you say : "We would place in the hands of the people themselves the right of veto. We are certain they will not misuse it." A high civilisation is said to produce a sense of fear; is not that because we look only at the face of affairs in general and regard not the more solid substance that lies beneath it P Have we any reason to doubt that there lie in the qualities of the British public the same characteristics so well defined by Robertson of Brighton in one of his letters, where he says :—
"Yes! goodness, duty, self-sacrifice—these are the qualities that England honours. She gapes like an awkward peasant at some other things, . . . but nothing stirs her grand old heart down to its central deeps universally and long except the Right. She puts on her shawl badly, and she is awkward enough in a concert room, scarcely knowing a Swedish nightingale from a jackdaw, but—blessings large and long upon her—she knows how to teach her sons to sink like men amidst sharks and billows without parade, without display, as if duty were the most natural thing in the world, and she never mistakes long an actor for a hero, or a hero for an actor."
May this be true now and ever !—I am, Sir, &c., F. M. H. Farnham, Royal.
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