All
round your hotel spreads a gridiron of railroad, yet such is the
force of the English genius for quiet that you hear no clatter of
trains; the expresses whir in and out of the station with not
more noise than humming-birds; and amid this peace the past has
some chance with modernity. The Britons dwell, unmolested by our
latter-day clamor, in their wattled huts and dugouts; the Romans
come and make them slaves and then Christians, and after three or
four hundred years send word from the Tiber to the Ouse that they
can stay no longer, and so leave them naked to their enemies, the
Picts and Scots and Saxons and Angles; and in due course come the
ravaging and burning Danes; and in due course still, the
murdering and plundering and scorning Normans. But all so
quietly, like the humming-bird-like expresses, with a kind of
railway celerity in the foreshortened retrospect; and after the
Normans have crushed themselves down into the mass of the
vanquished, and formed the English out of the blend, there follow
the many wars of the successions, of the Roses, of the Stuarts,
with all the intermediate insurrections and rebellions.
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