move him, he is adored in the form of
post. A hint of his willingness in any direction, causes a perilous
rush of his devotees. Nor is there reason to suppose we have drawn the
fanatical subserviency from the example of our subject India. We may
deem it native; perhaps of its origin Aryan, but we have made it our
own. Some have been so venturesome as to trace the lordliness of Bull to
the protecting smiles of the good Neptune, whose arms are about him to
encourage the development of a wanton eccentricity. Certain weeds of
the human bosom are prompt to flourish where safeness would seem to be
guaranteed. Men, for instance, of stoutly independent incomes are prone
to the same sort of wilfulness as Bull's, the salve abject submission to
it which we behold in his tidal bodies of supporters. Neptune has done
something. One thinks he has done much, at a rumour of his inefficiency
to do the utmost. Spy you insecurity?--a possibility of invasion? Then
indeed the colossal creature, inaccessible to every argument, is open to
any suggestion: the oak-like is a reed, the bull a deer. But as there is
no attack on his shores, there is no proof that they are invulnerable.
Neptune is appealed to and replies by mouth of the latest passenger
across the Channel on a windy night:--Take heart, son John! They will
have poor stomachs for blows who intrude upon you. The testification to
the Sea-God's watchfulness restores his darling who is immediately
as horny to argument as before. Neptune shall have his share of the
honours.

Ideal of his country Bull has none--he hates the word; it smells of
heresy, opposition to his image. It is an exercise of imagination to
accept an ideal, and his digestive organs reject it, after the manner
of the most beautiful likeness of him conjurable to the mind--that
flowering stomach, the sea-anemone, which opens to anything and speedily
casts out what it cannot consume. He is a positive shape, a practical
corporation, and the best he can see is the mirror held up to him by
his bards of the Press and his jester Frank Guffaw. There, begirt
by laughing ocean-waves, manifestly blest, he glorifies his handsome
roundness, like that other Foam-Born, whom the decorative Graces
robed in vestments not so wonderful as printed sheets. Rounder at each
inspection, he preaches to mankind from the text of a finger curved upon
the pattern spectacles. Your Frenchmen are revolutionising, wagering
on tentative politics; your Germa