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, respectfulness
in times of reverse. Brains, he is reduced to apprehend, brains are
the generators of the conquering energies. He is now for brains at
all costs, he has gained a conception of them. He is ready to knock
knighthood on the heads of men of brains--even literary brains.
They shall be knights, an ornamental body. To make them peers, and a
legislative, has not struck him, for he has not yet imagined them a
stable body. They require petting, to persuade them to flourish and
bring him esteem.

This is Mr. Bull, our image before the world, whose pranks are passed
as though the vivid display of them had no bad effect on the nation.
Doubtless the perpetual mirror, the slavish mirror, is to blame, but his
nakedness does not shrink from the mirror, he likes it and he is proud
of it. Beneath these exhibitions the sober strong spirit of the country,
unfortunately not a prescient one, nor an attractively loveable, albeit
of a righteous benevolence, labours on, doing the hourly duties for
the sake of conscience, little for prospective security, little to win
affection. Behold it as the donkey of a tipsy costermonger, obedient to
go without the gift of expression. Its behaviour is honourable under
a discerning heaven, and there is ever something pathetic in a toilful
speechlessness; but it is of dogged attitude in the face of men. Salt is
in it to keep our fleshly grass from putrefaction; poets might proclaim
its virtues. They will not; they are averse. The only voice it has is
the Puritan bray, upon which one must philosophise asinically to unveil
the charm. So the world is pleased to let it be obscured by the paunch
of B