38 ENGLISHSAGA

in the lane and cut X cross, put Osgood on end upon his head, and
done unto him as was necessary to be done by way of remembrance
. . . Old Eat Nation was turned on end upon his head and well
spanked in the corner of Northcroft and upon the Wash."1 *

So, too, were schools and charities, walking by ancient beacons
lit by the piety of men of old and tended by a long procession of
successors. The Blue Coat boys of Christ's Hospital passed
through the London streets in the belted gown of Edward VFs
England and in the knee-breeches and shining shoe buckles of that
of George I: the children of the parish school of St. Botolph's
Bishopsgate still wore silver badges and muffin caps. At Eton,
under elms planted in the days of Charles I, the boys, celebrating
the martial heroes of antiquity, kept the old feast of Montem—
the tenure by which the College held its domains. All that
human courage, quixotry and goodness had achieved in the long
sordid struggle of man against the stubborn forces of nature was,
however crudely and imperfectly, treasured and commemorated
as though to remind the successive generations of their continu-
ing heritage and nobler destiny. Few could see unmoved the
heroic pageantry of the Trooping of the Colour or. the great
annual spectacle of six thousand London Charity children assem-
bled under the dome of St. Paul's, singing with that "honest old
English roughness that no man need feel ashamed of" while their
eyes shone with the thought of the feast before them. As after
the prayers thousands of glossy aprons fell simultaneously, it
seemed to one watching like the fall of snow.

It was not only its own tradition that England celebrated, but
those of the two great peoples of the ancient world—the Hebrew
and the Greek. Those who stood Sunday after Sunday in the
parish church identified the songs and faith of Zion with their
own rustic life. The manger in which Christ was born stood in
the byre where the friendly beasts of the field crowded on wintry
nights: the green pastures into which the Good Shepherd led his
flock were the meadows of home. Men who could not write
their names but whose memories were unimpaired, knew every
collect in the prayer book by heart and were as familiar with the
Bible names as with those of their own fields. So for the more
sophisticated the images of the classics were superimposed on
those of their own England: an Eton boy recalled his first May
Day walking by Fellow's Pond through a half-Grecian haze, "the

1W. £. Adams, Memoirs of a Social Atom, /, $4-6.