roops (humorous mercenaries when Celts) do his trumpeting best,
and offend not the Pierides.

This interlude, or rather inter-drone, repulsive to write, can hardly be
excluded from a theme dramatising Celtic views, and treating of a blood,
to which the idea of country must shine resplendently if we would have it
running at full tide through the arteries. Preserve your worship, if the
object fills your optics. Better worship that than nothing, as it is
better for flames to be blown out than not to ascend, otherwise it will
wreak circular mischief instead of illumining. You are requested simply
to recollect that there is another beside you who sees the object
obliquely, and then you will not be surprised by his irreverence. What
if, in the end, you were conducted to a like point of view? Self-worship,
it has been said, is preferable to no trimming of the faculty, but
worship does not necessarily cease with the extinction of this of the
voraciously carnal. An ideal of country, of Great Britain, is conceivable
that will be to the taste of Celt and Saxon in common, to wave as a
standard over their fraternal marching. Let Bull boo his drumliest at
such talk: it is, I protest, the thing we want and can have. He is the
obstruction, not the country; and against him, not against the country,
the shots are aimed which seem so malignant. Him the gay manipulators
propitiate who look at him through Literature and the Press, and across
the pulpit-cushions, like airy Macheath at Society, as carrion to batten
on. May plumpness be their portion, and they never hanged for it! But the
flattering, tickling, pleasantly pinching of Bull is one of those offices
which the simple starveling piper regards with afresh access of appetite
for the well-picked bone of his virtue. That ghastly apparition of the
fleshly present is revealed to him as a dead whale, having the harpoon of
the inevitable slayer of the merely fleshly in his oils. To humour him,
and be his piper for his gifts, is to descend to a carnival deep
underneath. While he reigns, thinks this poor starveling, Rome burns, or
the explosive powders are being secretly laid. He and his thousand
Macheaths are dancing the country the giddy pace, and there will, the
wretch dreads, be many a crater of scoria in the island, before he
stretches his inanimate length, his parasites upon him. The theme is
chosen and must be treated as a piper involved in his virtue conceives
it: that is, realistically