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﻿Rh  his sympathetic heart; if we could take him back again to a bookless house, and turn him out alone upon the verandah to smoke his solitary weed, unsolaced by the Saturday or the Globe; if we could keep him for twelve months in this purposeless life, without music, art, science, congenial talk — even though cynical — if we could do all this, believe me, our friend would return to his club at last, a gladder and a wiser man, ready to own that the Academy and the Royal Society have their advantages, that South Kensington and the British Museum are something other than an egregious bore, and that the power to take a country walk over the green rolling downs, commanding a view into some pleasant English combe, with its Norman church-tower and its Elizabethan manor-house, forms just as appreciable an element in his happiness as the addition of an extra hundred to his income or his salary. These are the things which we miss in the tropics, and for which no adventitious advantages of mere money payment can ever compensate us. The years spent between those self-same imaginary parallels on our terrestrial globe I count as just so much dead loss of time cut away from one's allotted span.

And now, as the preachers say — I feel as though I had been gradually dropping into the didactic strain of a sermon — I have done my best to expose, so far as in me lay, the true nature of the great tropical fallacy. I may, perhaps, have drawn my picture rather too grimly from the other side, but where an exaggerated view prevails, exaggeration in the other direction can alone redress the balance of truth. It is useless to fight a popular belief with gentle language; a good hearty denunciation is needed to impress the speaker's conviction. Besides, in the case of the tropics, I feel strongly on personal grounds. I have myself been deceived and played upon; I have read the late Canon Kingsley's rhapsodies and marvelled over the exquisite word-painting of Bernardin de St. Pierre. But now I come out like the countryman at the fair, who pays his penny to behold the wonderful sea serpent, and is introduced to a tame seal in a tub of water. Under such circumstances, some countrymen and some wayfarers, for very shame, keep up the wicked delusion, lest bystanders should mock at their credulity; but for my part, I prefer to take my stand at the door of the tent, and warn all and sundry that this tropical show is a gigantic and unconscionable sham.

 

 From The Spectator.

in history is more strange, though it seems to us all so natural, than the quiet, persistent, immovable refusal of the English people, a refusal continued through seven generations, to care anything about Hanover. Five successive kings, one of whom was among the most popular of English sovereigns, had it most nearly at their hearts that their English subjects should care. Ministry after ministry accepted the sovereign's view, and either did care, or made believe to care so much that they fought, and wrote despatches, and intrigued for the sake of Hanover. When, in 1815, the Continent emerged from the deluge under which all landmarks had been lost, the English envoy — in terms which we shall know one day, when the secret archives of Hanover see the light, in that history of Hanover under English kings, which we recommend to the next historian in want of a subject — demanded the restoration of Hanover as a first article in his claims, and it was granted, but still the English people paid to the little kingdom no attention. They did not visit it, they did not study it, they did not recollect it, or recollected it only with a dislike which, if faint, was so real that to be a Hanoverian was to be in this country, in popular opinion, disqualified for royal favor. So universal and so deep-seated was the feeling, that people thought it quite natural, and still think it so, never inquired into its origin, and refused altogether to discuss,arguments on the opposite side. Yet so far from its being natural, it may safely be said that to any other people but the English, Hanover would have seemed a most precious possession. Its elector-kings were always most anxious to draw the bonds between the electorate and the kingdom closer, and so far from neglecting Britain for Hanover, neglected Hanover for Britain, in a way that only Germans, and Germans of the pre-national age, would have endured. They seldom went there, they governed through viceroys, and they spent their Hanoverian income in Great Britain. The junction of the crowns gave Britain the possibility of an immense position on the Continent, a free entry for its troops to points whence they could protect Holland, Belgium, and Denmark, menace Prussia, and exercise a direct influence over the policy of southern Germany. All that we obtain by our alliance with Belgium was secured in a much greater degree by our 