son of prosperity Rockney lashed the old fellow with the
crisis he was breeding for us; and when prostration ensued no English
tongue was loftier in preaching dignity and the means of recovery. Our
monumental image of the Misuse of Peace he pointed out unceasingly as at
a despot constructed by freemen out of the meanest in their natures
to mock the gift of liberty. His articles of foregone years were an
extraordinary record of events or conditions foreseen: seductive in the
review of them by a writer who has to be still foreseeing: nevertheless,
that none of them were bardic of Bull, and that our sound man would have
acted wisely in heeding some of the prescriptions, constituted their
essential merit, consolatory to think of, though painful. The country
has gone the wrong road, but it may yet cross over to the right one,
when it perceives that we were prophetic.

Compared with the bolts discharged at Bull by Rockney's artillery,
Captain Con O'Donnell's were popgun-pellets. Only Rockney fired to
chasten, Con O'Donnell for a diversion, to appease an animus. The
revolutionist in English journalism was too devoutly patriotic to
belabour even a pantomime mask that was taken as representative of us
for the disdainful fun of it. Behind the plethoric lamp, now blown
with the fleshpots, now gasping puffs of panic, he saw the well-minded
valorous people, issue of glorious grandsires; a nation under a
monstrous defacement, stupefied by the contemplation of the mask: his
vision was of the great of old, the possibly great in the graver strife
ahead, respecters of life, despisers of death, the real English whereas
an alienated Celtic satirist, through his vivid fancy and his disesteem,
saw the country incarnate in Bull, at most a roguish screw-kneed clown
to be whipped out of him. Celt and Saxon are much inmixed with us, but
the prevalence of Saxon blood is evinced by the public disregard of any
Celtic conception of the honourable and the loveable; so that the Celt
anxious to admire is rebutted, and the hatred of a Celt, quick as he is
to catch at images, has a figure of hugeous animalism supplied to his
malign contempt. Rockney's historic England, and the living heroic
England to slip from that dull hide in a time of trial, whether of war
or social suffering, he cannot see, nor a people hardening to Spartan
lineaments in the fire, iron men to meet disaster, worshippers of a
discerned God of Laws, and just men too, thinking to do just