he 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 fist, his
religious veneration of his habitual indulgences, his peculiar forms of
nightmare. They swear to his perfect personification of your moods, your
Saxon moods, which their inconsiderate spleen would have us take for
unmixedly Saxon. They are unjust, but many of them speak with a sense of
the foot on their necks, and they are of a blood demanding a
worshipworthy idea. And they dislike Bull's bellow of disrespect for
their religion, much bruited in the meadows during his periods of
Arcadia. They dislike it, cannot forget the sound: it hangs on the
afflicted drum of the ear when they are in another land, perhaps when the
old devotion to their priest has expired. For this, as well as for
material reasons, they hug the hatred they packed up among their bundles
of necessaries and relics, in the flight from home, and