“Don’t talk of ‘you,’ Claude!  You know well what I think on that point.  Never did one nation make the amende honorable to another more fully and nobly than you have to us; and those who try to keep up the quarrel are—­I won’t say what.  But the truth is, Claude, we have had no real sorrows; and therefore we can afford to play with imaginary ones.  God grant that we may not have our real ones—­that we may not have to drink of the cup of which our great mother drank two years ago!”

“It was a wholesome bitter for us; and it may be so for you likewise:  but we will have no sad forebodings on the eve of the blessed Christmas-tide.  He lives, He loves, He reigns; and all is well, for we are His, and He is ours.”

“Ah,” said Stangrave, “when Emerson sneered at you English for believing your Old Testament, he little thought that that was the lesson which it had taught you; and that that same lesson was the root of all your greatness.  That that belief in God’s being, in some mysterious way, the living King of England and of Christendom, has been the very idea which has kept you in peace and safety, now for many a hundred years, moving slowly on from good to better, not without many backslidings and many shortcomings, but still finding out, quickly enough, when you were on the wrong road, and not ashamed to retrace your steps, and to reform, as brave strong men should dare to do; a people who have been for many an age in the vanguard of all the nations, and the champions of sure and solid progress throughout the world; because what is new among you is not patched artificially on to the old, but grows organically out of it, with a growth like that of your own English oak, whose every new-year’s leaf-crop is fed by roots which burrow deep in many a buried generation, and the rich soil of full a thousand years.”

“Stay!” said the little artist.  “We are quite conceited enough already, without your eloquent adulation, sir!  But there is a truth in your words.  There is a better spirit roused among us, and that not merely of two years ago.  I knew this part of the country well in 1846-7-8, and since then, I can bear witness, a spirit of self-reform has been awakened round here, in many a heart which I thought once utterly frivolous.  I find, in every circle of every class, men and women asking to be taught their duty, that they may go and do it; I find everywhere schools, libraries, and mechanics’ institutes springing up:  and rich and poor meeting together more and more in the faith that God has made them all.  As for the outward and material improvements—­you know as well as I, that since free trade and emigration, the labourers confess themselves better off than they have been for fifty years; and though you will not see in the chalk counties that rapid and enormous agricultural improvement which you will in Lincolnshire, Yorkshire, or the Lothians, yet you shall see enough to-day to settle for you the question whether we old-country folk are in a state of decadence and decay. Par exemple—­”