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has been always cast in the teeth of us Englishmen by our Continental critics that we take our amusements seriously—that our idea of recreation is to go forth and kill something, and that anything of the nature of excitement is unknown to us; even our wars seem to them to be conducted by us in a cold-blooded, business-like, almost saturnine fashion, such as the foreigner cannot understand. Our almost fanatical excitement over the relief of Mafeking and of Ladysmith might have served to disenlighten our neighbours to a certain degree, but they probably regarded those wild bursts of enthusiasm as a mere phase of a fever, as one of the periodic alternations of heat