ns ploughing in philosophy, thumbing
classics, composing music of a novel order: both are marching,
evolutionising, learning how to kill. Ridiculous Germans! capricious
Frenchmen! We want nothing new in musical composition and abstract
speculation of an indecent mythology, or political contrivances and
schemes of Government, and we do not want war. Peace is the Goddess we
court for the hand of her daughter Plenty, and we have won that jolly
girl, and you are welcome to the marriage-feast; but avaunt new-fangled
theories and howlings: old tunes, tried systems, for us, my worthy
friends.

Roundness admiring the growth of its globe may address majestic
invitation to the leaner kine. It can exhibit to the world that Peace
is a most desirable mother-in-law; and it is tempted to dream of capping
the pinnacle of wisdom when it squats on a fundamental truth. Bull's
perusal of the Horatian carpe diem is acute as that of the cattle in fat
meads; he walks like lusty Autumn carrying his garner to drum on, for
a sign of his diligent wisdom in seizing the day. He can read the page
fronting him; and let it be of dining, drinking, toasting, he will
vociferously confute the wiseacre bookworms who would have us believe
there is no such thing as a present hour for man.

In sad fact, the member for England is often intoxicate. Often do we
have him whirling his rotundity like a Mussulman dervish inflated by the
spirit to agitate the shanks, until pangs of a commercial crisis awaken
him to perceive an infructuous past and an unsown future, without
one bit of tracery on its black breast other than that which his
apprehensions project. As for a present hour, it swims, it vanishes,
thinner than the phantom banquets of recollection. What has he done
for the growth of his globe of brains?--the lesser, but in our rightful
posture the upper, and justly the directing globe, through whose
directions we do, by feeding on the past to sow the future, create a
sensible present composed of both--the present of the good using of
our powers. What can he show in the Arts? What in Arms? His
bards--O faithless! but they are men--his bards accuse him of sheer
cattle-contentedness in the mead, of sterility of brain, drowsihood,
mid-noddyism, downright carcase-dulness. They question him to deafen him
of our defences, our intellectual eminence, our material achievements,
our poetry, our science; they sneer at his trust in Neptune, doubt the
scaly invulnerability