ess 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
Bull. 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 t