The type is scarcely that of the essential Englishman, yet it is one type, and a notably interesting type, really racy of the soil. Borrow--less of a fine gentleman than Thicknesse, but more of a genius--belonged to the type. Landor, a man cast in a much grander mould, was yet of the same sort, and the story which tells how he threw his Italian cook out of the window, and then exclaimed with sudden compunction, "Good God! I forgot the violets," is altogether in the spirit of Thicknesse. Trelawney was a man of this kind, and so was Sir Richard Burton. In later years the men of this type have tended, not so much to smooth their angularities as to attenuate and subtilise them, and we have Samuel Butler and Goldwin Smith, but in a rougher and more downright form there was much of the same temper in William Stead. They are an uncomfortable race of men, but in many ways admirable; we should be proud rather than ashamed of them. Their unreasonableness, their inconsiderateness, their irritability, their singular gleams of insight, their exuberant energy of righteous vituperation, the curious irregularities of their minds,--however personally alien one may happen to find such qualities,--can never fail to interest and delight.
_May 13_.--When Aristotle declared that it is part of probability that the improbable should sometimes happen he invented a formula that is apt for the largest uses. Thus it is a part of justice that injustice should sometimes be done, or, as Gourmont puts it, Injustice is one of the forms of Justice. There lies a great truth which most of the civilised nations of the world have forgotten.
On Candide's arrival in Portsmouth Harbour he found that an English admiral had just been solemnly shot, in the sight of the whole fleet, for having failed to kill as many Frenchmen as with better judgment he might have killed. "Dans ce pays-ci il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres." I suppose that Voltaire was alluding to the trial by court martial of Admiral Byng, which took place in Portsmouth Harbour in 1757, while he was writing _Candide_.
To encourage the others! England has been regarded as a model of political methods, and that is the method of justice by which, throughout the whole period of her vital development, she has ensured the purity and the efficiency of her political and social growth. Byng was shot in order that, some eighteen months later, Nelson might be brought into life. It was a triumphantly successful method. If our modern progress has carried us beyond that method it is only because progress means change rather than betterment.