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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 November 2014
There are names in English history—Pym and Cromwell, Walpole and Pitt, Cobbett and Gladstone—that sum up in themselves the supreme embodiment of the English character. Mr. Churchill belongs indisputably to that great company. He has symbolized in his person the characteristics that have become known as English since the Henrican Reformation. In a fantastically varied lifetime he has moved from one role to another with all the calm assurance of the aristocrat-politician for whom occupation has been not so much a necessary vocation as a high adventure to be sought out. In each of the roles he has displayed ability and genius sufficient to endow half a dozen reputable careers. If to his English ancestry he owes his natural aptitude for affairs and a grand style of entering upon them, to his American background he owes his flair for self-advertisement and his genius for the melodramatic. He has managed to personify the national hero-figure of John Bull in much the same way as Lincoln, with the aid of the able cartoonist Thomas Nast, came to embody the American symbol of Uncle Sam. He has personified homo anglicanus: a being with all kinds of crotchety prejudices, frequently wrong in his opinions, rarely mean in his battles, suspicious of general ideas, with admiration for the courage that stands up for what it believes in and with no pity for the weakness that cringes, possessed of a capacity to be curiously sentimental and passionately angry.
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