om.

But there are passages worth finding in books less promising. Those who
potter in libraries, especially if they have courage to meddle with big
volumes, sometimes find curious things--for all gems are not collected
in caskets. In searching through the solid pages of Hatsell's Precedents
in Parliament for something one doesn't find, it is some consolation to
alight on such a precedent as the following, set forth as likely to
throw light on the mysterious process called "naming a member." "A story
used to be told of Mr Onslow, which those who ridiculed his strict
observance of forms were fond of repeating, that as he often, upon a
member's not attending to him, but persisting in any disorder,
threatened to name him--'Sir, sir, I must name you'--on being asked what
would be the consequence of putting that threat in execution and naming
a member, he answered, 'The Lord in heaven knows.'"

In the perusal of a very solid book on the progress of the
ecclesiastical differences of Ireland, written by a native of that
country, after a good deal of tedious and vexatious matter, the reader's
complacency is restored by an artless statement how an eminent person
"abandoned the errors of the Church of Rome, and adopted those of the
Church of England."

So also a note I have preserved of a brief passage descriptive of the
happy conclusion of a duel runs thus:--

"The one party received a slight wound in the breast; the other fired in
the air--and so the matter terminated."[43]

[Footnote 43: This passage has been quoted and read by many people quite
unconscious of the arrant bull it contains. Indeed, an eminent London
newspaper, to which the word Bull cannot be unfamiliar, tells me, in
reviewing my first edition, that it is no bull at all, but a plain
statement of fact, and boldly quotes it in confirmation of this opinion.
There could be no better testimony to its being endowed with the subtle
spirit of the genuine article. Irish bulls, as it has been said of
constitutions, "are not made--they grow," and that only in their own
native soil. Those manufactured for the stage and the anecdote-books
betray their artificial origin in their breadth and obviousness. The
real bull carries one with it at first by an imperceptible confusion and
misplacement of ideas in the mind where it has arisen, and it is not
until you reason back that you see it. Horace Walpole used to say that
the best of all bulls, from its thorough and grotesque