when it squats on a fundamental truth. Bull's perusal
of the Horatian carpe diem is acute as that of the cattle in fat meads;
he walks like lusty Autumn carrying his garner to drum on, for a sign of
his diligent wisdom in seizing the day. He can read the page fronting
him; and let it be of dining, drinking, toasting, he will vociferously
confute the wiseacre bookworms who would have us believe there is no such
thing as a present hour for man.

In sad fact, the member for England is often intoxicate. Often do we have
him whirling his rotundity like a Mussulman dervish inflated by the
spirit to agitate the shanks, until pangs of a commercial crisis awaken
him to perceive an infructuous past and an unsown future, without one bit
of tracery on its black breast other than that which his apprehensions
project. As for a present hour, it swims, it vanishes, thinner than the
phantom banquets of recollection. What has he done for the growth of his
globe of brains?--the lesser, but in our rightful posture the upper, and
justly the directing globe, through whose directions we do, by feeding on
the past to sow the future, create a sensible present composed of
both--the present of the good using of our powers. What can he show in
the Arts? What in Arms? His bards--O faithless! but they are men--his
bards accuse him of sheer cattle-contentedness in the mead, of sterility
of brain, drowsihood, mid-noddyism, downright carcase-dulness. They
question him to deafen him of our defences, our intellectual eminence,
our material achievements, our poetry, our science; they sneer at his
trust in Neptune, doubt the scaly invulnerability of the God. They point
over to the foreigner, the clean-stepping, braced, self-confident
foreigner, good at arms, good at the arts, and eclipsing us in
industriousness manual and mental, and some dare to say, in splendour of
verse=-our supreme accomplishment.

Then with one big fellow, the collapse of pursiness, he abandons his
pedestal of universal critic; prostrate he falls to the foreigner; he is
down, he is roaring; he is washing his hands of English performances,
lends ear to foreign airs, patronises foreign actors, browses on reports
from camps of foreign armies. He drops his head like a smitten ox to all
great foreign names, moaning 'Shakespeare!' internally for a sustaining
apostrophe. He well-nigh loves his poets, can almost understand what
poetry means. If it does not pay, it brings him fame, respectfuln