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THE EGREGIOUS ENGLISH

by

ANGUS McNEILL






[Illustration]

New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons
London: Grant Richards
1903

Copyright, 1902, by
Angus McNeill

Published, January, 1903

The Knickerbocker Press, New York




CONTENTS


  CHAPTER                                    PAGE

      I.--Apollo                                1

     II.--The Sportsman                        13

    III.--The Man of Business                  20

     IV.--The Journalist                       28

      V.--The Employed Person                  37

     VI.--Chiffon                              47

    VII.--The Soldier                          59

   VIII.--The Navy                             71

     IX.--The Churches                         79

      X.--The Politician                       90

     XI.--Poets                               103

    XII.--Fiction                             113

   XIII.--Suburbanism                         124

    XIV.--The Man-about-Town                  137

     XV.--Drink                               144

    XVI.--Food                                153

   XVII.--Law and Order                       163

  XVIII.--Education                           171

    XIX.--Recreation                          183

     XX.--Stock Exchange                      192

    XXI.--The Beloved                         199




The Egregious English




CHAPTER I

APOLLO


It has become the Englishman's habit, one might almost say the
Englishman's instinct, to take himself for the head and front of the
universe. The order of creation began, we are told, in protoplasm.
It has achieved at length the Englishman. Herein are the culmination
and ultimate glory of evolutionary processes. Nature, like the
seventh-standard boy in a board school, "can get no higher." She
has made the Englishman, and her work therefore is done. For the
continued progress of the world and all that in it is, the Englishman
will make due provision. He knows exactly what is wanted, and by
himself it shall be supplied. There is little that can be considered
distinguishingly English which does not reflect this point of view. As
an easy-going, entirely confident, imperturbable piece of arrogance,
the Englishman has certainly no mammalian compeer. Even in the blackest
of his troubles he perceives that he is great. "I shall muddle
through," he says. He is expected and understood to muddle through;
and, muddle through or not, he invariably believes he has done it.
Sheer complacency bolsters him up on every hand. At his going forth the
rest of the world is fain to abase itself in the dust. He is the strong
man, the white man of white men. He is the rich, clean sportsman, the
incomparable, the fearless, the intolerable. And by "Englishman" the
world has learned not to mean "Briton." The world has been taught to
discriminate. It has regarded the Britannic brotherhood; and though it
forgets that the Gael and the Celt are Britons, it takes its Englishman
for a Briton, only with a difference. On the other hand, it is keenly
sensible of sundry facts--as that it is the Englishman who rules the
waves and the Englishman upon whose dominions the sun never sets; that
the British flag is the English flag, the British army the English
army, and the British navy the English navy, and that Scotland and
Ireland, with Wales, are English appanages. It would be foolish to
assert that the Englishman has greatly concerned himself in either the
promulgation or the acceptance of these notions. But he holds them
dear, and they are ineradicably planted in his subconsciousness.

One is inclined to think, however, that, while the supremacy and
superiority of the Englishman have been received without traverse in
his own dominions, there are those in outer darkness--on the Continent,
in Ireland, and even in Scotland--who admit no such supremacy and
no such superiority. Nay, there be persons breathing the breath of
life who, so far from looking upon the Englishman with the eyes with
which the early savage must have regarded Captain Cook, look upon him
with