How shall I describe the English temper, which the Germans, high and low, learned and ignorant, have so profoundly mistaken?  You can get no description of it from the Englishman pure and simple; he has no theory of himself, and it bores him to hear himself described.  Yet it is this temper which has given England her great place in the world and which has cemented the British Empire.  It is to be found not in England alone, but wherever there is a strain of English blood or an acceptance of English institutions.  You can find it in Australia, in Canada, in America; it infects Scotland, and impresses Wales.  It is everywhere in our trenches to-day.  It is not clannish, or even national, it is essentially the lonely temper of a man independent to the verge of melancholy.  An admirable French writer of to-day has said that the best handbook and guide to the English temper is Defoe’s romance of Robinson Crusoe.  Crusoe is practical, but is conscious of the over-shadowing presence of the things that are greater than man.  He makes his own clothing, teaches his goats to dance, and wrestles in thought with the problems suggested by his Bible.  Another example of the same temper may be seen in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and yet another in Wordsworth’s Prelude.  There is no danger that English thought will ever underestimate the value and meaning of the individual soul.  The greatest English literature, it might almost be said, from Shakespeare’s Hamlet to Browning’s The Ring and the Book, is concerned with no other subject.  The age-long satire against the English is that in England every man claims the right to go to heaven his own way.  English institutions, instead of subduing men to a single pattern, are devised chiefly with the object of saving the rights of the subject and the liberty of the individual.  ‘Every man in his humour’ is an English proverb, and might almost be a statement of English constitutional doctrine.  But this extreme individualism is the right of all, and does not favour self-exaltation.  The English temper has an almost morbid dislike of all that is showy or dramatic in expression.  I remember how a Winchester boy, when he was reproached with the fact that Winchester has produced hardly any great men, replied, ’No, indeed, I should think not.  We would pretty soon have knocked that out of them.’  And the epigrams of the English temper usually take the form of understatement.  ’Give Dayrolles a chair’ were the last dying words of Lord Chesterfield, spoken of the friend who had come to see him.  When the French troops go over the parapet to make an advance, their battle cry shouts the praises of their Country.  The British troops prefer to celebrate the advance in a more trivial fashion, ‘This way to the early door, sixpence extra.’