As to the affair of the English monument to Shakspere, every people has its own mode of commemoration, and I think there is a great deal to be said for ours.  There is the French monumental style, which consists in erecting very pompous statues, very well done.  There is the German monumental style, which consists in erecting very pompous statues, badly done.  And there is the English monumental method, the great English way with statues, which consists in not erecting them at all.  A statue may be dignified; but the absence of a statue is always dignified.  For my part, I feel there is something national, something wholesomely symbolic, in the fact that there is no statue of Shakspere.  There is, of course, one in Leicester Square; but the very place where it stands shows that it was put up by a foreigner for foreigners.  There is surely something modest and manly about not attempting to express our greatest poet in the plastic arts in which we do not excel.  We honour Shakspere as the Jews honour God—­by not daring to make of him a graven image.  Our sculpture, our statues, are good enough for bankers and philanthropists, who are our curse:  not good enough for him, who is our benediction.  Why should we celebrate the very art in which we triumph by the very art in which we fail?

England is most easily understood as the country of amateurs.  It is especially the country of amateur soldiers (that is, of Volunteers), of amateur statesmen (that is, of aristocrats), and it is not unreasonable or out of keeping that it should be rather specially the country of a careless and lounging view of literature.  Shakspere has no academic monument for the same reason that he had no academic education.  He had small Latin and less Greek, and (in the same spirit) he has never been commemorated in Latin epitaphs or Greek marble.  If there is nothing clear and fixed about the emblems of his fame, it is because there was nothing clear and fixed about the origins of it.  Those great schools and Universities which watch a man in his youth may record him in his death; but Shakspere had no such unifying traditions.  We can only say of him what we can say of Dickens.  We can only say that he came from nowhere and that he went everywhere.  For him a monument in any place is out of place.  A cold statue in a certain square is unsuitable to him as it would be unsuitable to Dickens.  If we put up a statue of Dickens in Portland Place to-morrow we should feel the stiffness as unnatural.  We should fear that the statue might stroll about the street at night.

But in France the question of whether Zola shall go to the Pantheon when he is dead is quite as practicable as the question whether he should go to prison when he was alive.  It is the problem of whether the nation shall take one turn of thought or another.  In raising a monument to Zola they do not raise merely a trophy, but a finger-post.  The question is one which will have to be settled in most European