1. Norman and Saxon shun each other.
2. Norman has become aristocrat.
3. Would-be aristocrat (present representative of Norman) shuns possible plebeian (present representative of Saxon).
[20] It so happens that I am writing this Essay in a rough wooden hut of my own, which is in reality a most comfortable little building, though “stuffy luxury” is rigorously excluded.
[21] At present it is most inadequately represented by a few unimportant gifts. The donors have desired to break the rule of exclusion, and have succeeded so far, but that is all.
[22] These, of course, are only examples of vulgar patriotic ignorance. A few Frenchmen who have really seen what is best in English landscape are delighted with it; but the common impression about England is that it is an ugly country covered with usines, and on which the sun never shines.
[23] The French word univers has three or four distinct senses. It may mean all that exists, or it may mean the solar system, or it may mean the earth’s surface, in whole or in part. Voltaire said that Columbus, by simply looking at a map of our univers, had guessed that there must be another, that is, the western hemisphere. “Paris est la plus belle ville de l’univers” means simply that Paris is the most beautiful city in the world.
[24] A French critic recently observed that his countrymen knew little of the tragedy of “Macbeth” except the familiar line “To be or not to be, that is the question!”
[25] I never make a statement of this kind without remembering instances, even when it does not seem worth while to mention them particularly. It is not of much use to quote what one has heard in conversation, but here are two instances in print. Reclus, the French geographer, in “La Terre à Vol d’Oiseau,” gives a woodcut of the Houses of Parliament and calls it “L’Abbaye de Westminster.” The same error has even occurred in a French art periodical.
[26] Rodolphe, in “L’Honneur et l’Argent.”