be bad in London. Taine carried out that principle in his history of English literature; and since Taine, says M. Texte, 'the history of literature has been above all an ethnological problem.' In fact, all great English writers, as Taine showed us, were incarnations of the great John Bull; and Bull's peculiarities are to be explained, if we must explain further, by his race and his fogs. But this at once seems to involve whole systems of theory. We do not know accurately what is the composition of John Bull himself; how much of him, for example, is Celtic and how much Teuton; and few things are more difficult than to describe accurately the characteristics by which one race differs from another. A Frenchman and an Englishman represent different types. We all perceive the difference, but to say precisely in what it consists we should require nothing less than a complete psychology. We may take for granted, however, that we can fairly assume that a national character exists, and that it is very distinctly manifested in the corresponding literature. Then we can make at least some provisional inferences, to be verified or disproved when somebody will tell us what, after all, is the real distinction.
