ice; he
has Bull on the eye, the alternately braggart and poltroon, sweating in
labour that he may gorge the fruits, graceless to a scoffer. And this is
the creature to whose tail he is tied! Hereditary hatred is approved by
critical disgust. Some spirited brilliancy, some persistent generosity
(other than the guzzle's flash of it), might soften him; something
sweeter than the slow animal well-meaningness his placable brethren
point his attention to. It is not seen, and though he can understand the
perils of a severance, he prefers to rub the rawness of his wound and be
ready to pitch his cap in the air for it, out of sheer bloodloathing of
a connection that offers him nothing to admire, nothing to hug to his
heart. Both below and above the blind mass of discontent in his island,
the repressed sentiment of admiration-or passion of fealty and thirst
to give himself to a visible brighter--is an element of the division:
meditative young Patrick O'Donnell early in his reflections had noted
that:--and it is partly a result of our daily habit of tossing the straw
to the monetary world and doting on ourselves in the mirror, until
our habitual doings are viewed in a bemused complacency by us, and the
scum-surface of the country is flashed about as its vital being. A man
of forethought using the Press to spur Parliament to fitly represent the
people, and writing on his daily topics with strenuous original vigour,
even though, like Rockney, he sets the teeth of the Celt gnashing at
him, goes a step nearer to the bourne of pacification than Press and
Parliament reflecting the popular opinion that law must be passed to
temper Ireland's eruptiveness; for that man can be admired, and the
Celt, in combating him, will like an able and gallant enemy better than
a grudgingly just, lumbersome, dull, politic friend. The material points
in a division are always the stronger, but the sentimental are here
very strong. Pass the laws; they may put an extinguisher on the Irish
Vesuvian; yet to be loved you must be a little perceptibly admirable.
You may be so self-satisfied as to dispense with an ideal: your
yoke-fellow is not; it is his particular form of strength to require one
for his proper blooming, and he does bloom beautifully in the rays he
courts.

Ah then, seek to be loved, and banish Bull. Believe in a future
and banish that gross obscuration of you. Decline to let that
old-yeoman-turned alderman stand any longer for the national man.