Page:Books and men.djvu/109

 Rh each page of his country's history was the subject of close and loving scrutiny. All those Davids, and Williams, and Malcolms, about whom we have an indistinct notion that they spent their lives in being bullied by their neighbors and badgered by their subjects, were to his mind as kingly as Charlemagne on his Throne of the West; and their crimes and struggles and brief glorious victories were part of the ineffaceable knowledge of his boyhood. To feel history in this way, to come so close to the world's actors that our pulses rise and fall with their vicissitudes, is a better thing, after all, than the most accurate and reasonable of doubts. I knew two little English girls who always wore black frocks on the 30th of January, in honor of the "Royal Martyr," and tied up their hair with black ribbons, and tried hard to preserve the decent gravity of demeanor befitting such a doleful anniversary. The same little girls, it must be confessed, carried Holmby House to bed with them, and bedewed their pillows with many tears over the heart-rending descriptions thereof. What to them were the "outraged liberties of England," which Mr. Gosse