Arbuthnot’s best remembered work is ‘The History of John Bull’; not because many people read or will ever read the book itself, but because it fixed a typical name and a typical character ineffaceably in the popular fancy and memory.  He is credited with having been the first to use this famous sobriquet for the English nation; he was certainly the first to make it universal, and the first to make that burly, choleric, gross-feeding, hard-drinking, blunt-spoken, rather stupid and decidedly gullible, but honest and straightforward character one of the stock types of the world.  The book appeared as four separate pamphlets:  the first being entitled ’Law is a Bottomless Pit, Exemplified in the Case of Lord Strutt, John Bull, Nicholas Frog, and Lewis Baboon, Who Spent All They Had in a Law Suit’; the second, ‘John Bull in His Senses’; the third, ‘John Bull Still in His Senses’; and the fourth, ’Lewis Baboon Turned Honest, and John Bull Politician.’  Published in 1712, these were at once attributed to Swift.  But Pope says, “Dr. Arbuthnot was the sole writer of ‘John Bull’”; and Swift gives us still more conclusive evidence by writing, “I hope you read ‘John Bull.’  It was a Scotch gentleman, a friend of mine, that writ it; but they put it on to me.”  In his humorous preface Dr. Arbuthnot says:—­

“When I was first called to the office of historiographer to John Bull, he expressed himself to this purpose:—­’Sir Humphrey Polesworth, I know you are a plain dealer; it is for that reason I have chosen you for this important trust; speak the truth, and spare not.’  That I might fulfill those, his honorable intentions, I obtained leave to repair to and attend him in his most secret retirements; and I put the journals of all transactions into a strong box to be opened at a fitting occasion, after the manner of the historiographers of some Eastern monarchs....  And now, that posterity may not be ignorant in what age so excellent a history was written (which would otherwise, no doubt, be the subject of its inquiries), I think it proper to inform the learned of future times that it was compiled when Louis XIV. was King of France, and Philip, his grandson, of Spain; when England and Holland, in conjunction with the Emperor and the allies, entered into a war against these two princes, which lasted ten years, under the management of the Duke of Marlborough, and was put to a conclusion by the treaty of Utrecht under the ministry of the Earl of Oxford, in the year 1713.”

The characters disguised are:  “John Bull,” the English; “Nicholas Frog,” the Dutch; “Lewis Baboon,” the French king; “Lord Strutt,” the late King of Spain; “Philip Baboon,” the Duke of Anjou; “Esquire South,” the King of Spain; “Humphrey Hocus,” the Duke of Marlborough; and “Sir Roger Bold,” the Earl of Oxford.  The lawsuit was the War of the Spanish Succession; John Bull’s first wife was the late ministry; and his second wife the Tory ministry.  To explain the allegory further, John Bull’s mother was the Church of England; his sister Peg, the Scotch nation; and her lover Jack, Presbyterianism.