Page:Free Opinions, Freely Expressed on Certain Phases of Modern Social Life and Conduct.djvu/153

 gloomily through the "Calendar of Shakespearean Rarities," collected by Halliwell Phillips, which were offered to the wealthy city of Birmingham for £7,000, and reflect that this same wealthy city disgraced itself by refusing to purchase the collection and by allowing everything to be bought and carried away from England by "an American" in 1897. We do not say this American was a "Bounder"—nevertheless, if he had been a real lover of Shakespeare's memory, rather than of himself, he would have bought these relics for Shakespeare's native country and presented them for Shakespeare's sake to Shakespeare's native people, who are not, as a People, to blame for the parsimony of their Governments. They pay taxes enough in all conscience, and at least they deserve that what few relics remain of their Greatest Man should be saved and ensured to them.

But perhaps the American Millionaire-Bounder is at his best when he has bought an English newspaper and is running it in London. Then he feels as if he were running the Imperial Government itself—nay, almost the Monarchy. He imagines that he has his finger on the very pulse of Time. He hugs himself in the consciousness that the British people,—that large majority of them who are not behind the scenes—buy his paper, believing it to be a British paper, not a journal of "Amurrican" opinion, that is, opinion as ordered and paid for by one "Amurrican." He knows pretty well in his own mind that if they understood that such was the actual arrangement, they would save their pence. Unfortunately the great drawback of the "man in the street" who buys newspapers, is