Page:In the dozy hours, and other papers.djvu/124

 110 is a mighty bond, and nationality strengthens its fibres. We can no more imagine Bret Harte amid Jane Austen's placid surroundings, than we can imagine Dr. Holmes in a mining-camp, or Henry Fielding in Boston. Just as the Autocrat springs from Puritan ancestors, and embodies the intellectual traditions of New England, so Tom Jones, in his riotous young manhood, springs from that lusty Saxon stock, of whose courage, truthfulness, and good-tempered animalism he stands the most splendid representative. "The old order is passed and the new arises;" but Sophia Western has not yet yielded her place in the hearts of men to the morbid and self-centred heroines of modern fiction. Truest of all, is Charles Lamb who, more than any other humorist, more than any other man of letters, perhaps, belongs exclusively to his own land, and is without trace or echo of foreign influence. France was to Lamb, not a place where the finest prose is written, but a place where he ate frogs—"the nicest little delicate things—rabbity-flavored. Imagine a Lilliputian rabbit." Germany was little or nothing, and America was less. The child of London streets,