ull. We have, however, isolated groups, individuals in all classes,
by no means delighting in his representation of them. When such is felt
to be the case among a sufficient number, his bards blow him away as
a vapour; we hear that he is a piece of our English humour--we enjoy
grotesques and never should agree to paint ourselves handsome: our
subtle conceit insists on the reverse. Nevertheless, no sooner are the
hours auspicious to fatness than Bull is back on us; he is our family
goat, ancestral ghost, the genius of our comfortable sluggishness. And
he is at times a mad Bull: a foaming, lashing, trampling, horn-driving,
excessive, very parlous Bull. It is in his history that frenzies catch
him, when to be yoked to him is to suffer frightful shakings, not to
mention a shattering of our timbers. It is but in days of the rousing
of the under-spirit of the country, days of storm imprudent to pray the
advent of, that we are well rid of him for a while. In the interim he
does mischief, serious mischief; he does worse than when, a juvenile, he
paid the Dannegelt for peace. Englishmen of feeling do not relish
him. For men with Irish and Cambrian blood in their veins the rubicund
grotesque, with his unimpressionable front and his noisy benevolence of
the pocket, his fits of horned ferocity and lapses of hardheartedness,
is a shame and a loathing. You attach small importance to images and
symbols; yet if they seem representative, and they sicken numbers of
us, they are important. The hat we wear, though it is not a part of
the head, stamps the character of our appearance and has a positive
influence on our bearing. Symbolical decorations will stimulate the
vacant-minded to act up to them, they encircle and solidify the mass;
they are a sword of division between Celts and Saxons if they are
abhorrent to one section. And the Celtic brotherhood are not invariably
fools in their sensitiveness. They serve you on the field of Mars, and
on other fields to which the world has given glory. These execrate him
as the full-grown Golden Calf of heathenish worship. And they are so
restive because they are so patriotic. Think a little upon the ideas of
unpatriotic Celts regarding him. You have heard them. You tell us
they are you: accurately, they affirm, succinctly they see you in his
crescent outlines, tame bulk, spasms of alarm and foot on the weaker;
his imperviousness to whatsoever does not confront the sensual eye of
him with a cake or a f