j to ENGLISH SAGA

They saw him as their glorious prototype—both liberal and
tory, jingo and crusader—the game old cock whom Pilhch,
voicing the national sentiment, apostrophied on his 77th
birthday:

"An Irish Lord my John was born,
Both dullness and dons he held in scorn,
But he stood for Cambridge at twenty-one,
My gallant, gay John Palmerston!

With his hat o'er his eyes and his nose in the air,
So jaunty and genial and debonair,
Talk at him—to him—against him—none
Can take a rise out of Palmerston.

And suppose his parish registers say

He's seventy-seven if he's a day;

What's that, if you're still all fire and fun

Like Methuselah or John Palmerston?"
• • • • • • • •*

The spirit and health of this old man sprang from the same
sources as those of the nation for which he stood. Palmerston
directed the course of a great commercial empire from his town
house in Piccadilly, But when he needed recreation he rode in
white trousers across the green fields to the wooded Harrow Hill
of his schooldays or went down for the vacation to his native
Broadlands in Hampshire, So it was with England. Since the
'forties John Bull had donned the sober civic wear of the towns,
abjured horse for train, and settled down to work at lathe or
ledger among the chimney pots. But his strength still derived
from the countryside of his fathers in which, for all his new
absorption in money-making, his heart lay. "Home, sweet
home," the Englishman's favourite song, pictured not a tene-
ment building but a country cottage. London was only an
encampment from which all who could afford it fled so soon
as the Season and parliamentary session were over, when the
blinds were drawn, the hotels left empty and the clubs asleep.
"In France," a French traveller wrote, "we live in the towns
and go to the country. The Englishman resides in the country,
where his real home is. There he keeps his treasures, and pride
of race and station is given full play."1 Here the rural gentry,

11. Wfy A Frenchmen sees the English in the 'fifties, i<$-&f.