they instruct
their children to keep it burning. They transmit the sentiment of the
loathing of Bull, as assuredly they would be incapable of doing, even
with the will, were a splendid fire-eyed motherly Britannia the figure
sitting in the minds of men for our image--a palpitating figure, alive to
change, penetrable to thought, and not a stolid concrete of our
traditional old yeoman characteristic. Verily he lives for the present,
all for the present, will be taught in sorrow that there is no life for
him but of past and future: his delusion of the existence of a present
hour for man will not outlast the season of his eating and drinking
abundantly in security. He will perceive that it was no more than the
spark shot out from the clash of those two meeting forces; and penitently
will he gaze back on that misleading spark-the spectral planet it bids
wink to his unreceptive stars--acknowledging him the bare machine for
those two to drive, no instrument of enjoyment. He lives by reading
rearward and seeing vanward. He has no actual life save in power of
imagination. He has to learn this fact, the great lesson of all men.
Furthermore there may be a future closed to him if he has thrown too
extreme a task of repairing on that bare machine of his. The sight of a
broken-down plough is mournful, but the one thing to do with it is to
remove it from the field.

Among the patriotic of stout English substance, who blew in the trumpet
of the country, and were not bards of Bull to celebrate his firmness and
vindicate his shiftings, Richard Rockney takes front rank. A journalist
altogether given up to his craft, considering the audience he had gained,
he was a man of forethought besides being a trenchant writer, and he was
profoundly, not less than eminently, the lover of Great Britain. He had a
manner of utterance quite in the tone of the familiar of the antechamber
for proof of his knowing himself to be this person. He did not so much
write articles upon the health of his mistress as deliver Orphic
sentences. He was in one her physician, her spiritual director, her
man-at-arms. Public allusions to her were greeted with his emphatic
assent in a measured pitch of the voice, or an instantaneous flourish of
the rapier; and the flourish was no vain show. He meant hard steel to
defend the pill he had prescribed for her constitutional state, and the
monition for her soul's welfare. Nor did he pretend to special privileges
in assuming his