I am parochially minded; but my parish is a big one, taking in all civilized Europe and America. - Edward Augustus Freeman

But here comes the nuisance of the seventeenth century. One can't go unreservedly with any side, as one can with our friends in the thirteenth. My political and my religious sympathies are divided. I go with the Parliament as Parliament; but I can get up no sympathy with the Puritan as Puritan. I don't like his particular form of religion, and he is no more tolerant than anybody else. Surely Gardiner shows that in matters of opinion Laud was immeasureably more liberal than his enemies, and to the little that he really enforced in matters of ceremony there is the best witness, namely, that it has long been universally accepted without anybody of any party objecting, and that, though the letter of the law still allows something else.

I believe I hate the British army more than any institution in being. My loathing for it is in exact proportion to my admiration for the men who fought at Senlac and Muratovizza. Forwhy, if you have conscription or landwehr, a man simply obeys the law; if the war is unjust, it is simply like obeying or enforcing any bad law. ... The fault rests not with him, but with those who send him. But in our army every man, officer and private, is there by his own choice. He is not consulted about that particular war; but he chose the man-slaying trade, when he might have chosen some other; so he is, what the conscript or landwehr man is not, responsible for being there. I grant that this is rather ideal; and, as circumstances go I don't rate the responsibility very high, if they only keep quiet. But when they came back, strutting and swaggering, talking as if they had done something to be proud of instead of ashamed, I hold that they made themselves accomplices with the Jew in the murther of the Zulus. ... I don't value skill or bravery, any more than height, strength, or beauty, unless they are used to a good purpose.

Cast away all prejudices, all conventionalities, all subterfuges, look the thing boldly in the face, and will any one tell me either that it is really right to seek amusement in the suffering of any living creature, or that hunting is anything but amusement sought in the sufferings of a living creature? Will any one who engages in such sports tell me that he does not, for the time at least, stifle the divine voice of mercy within him, that he does not, for the time at least, give the reins to the passions of the wild beast or the savage? It may sound a hard saying, but in truth the joy of the hunter is only a lesser form of that intensified delight in cruelty which saw only a “merry, merry show," in those sports, those huntings, of old in which the human victim had to struggle against the lion and the tiger.