Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/29

Rh should have put off the mild habits of civilian life and become instantly as hardy, fearless, and chivalrous soldiers as any in the world's history, for these qualities also are in their birthright.

We are accustomed to being patronised as an unimaginative race, in spite of the fact that no country has produced a greater imaginative literature. We are accustomed to being classed as a nation of shopkeepers, and have accepted the description indifferently, for it is not as if we had been accused of limiting our business activities to a single trade and (emulating the peculiar Prussian aspiration) of transforming ourselves into a nation of butchers. When you think of it, we actually are shopkeepers, in the large, sane meaning of the term, nor is it any way to our discredit, so long as we make it clear, as we are doing again, that our honour is not of the things we sell.

Even Shakespeare was a shopkeeper, an unusually capable one; and his partnership in a successful theatrical business did not prevent him from being a greater poet