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 of the God.  They point over to the foreigner, the clean-stepping, braced, self-confident foreigner, good at arms, good at the arts, and eclipsing us in industriousness manual and mental, and some dare to say, in splendour of verse=-our supreme accomplishment.

Then with one big fellow, the collapse of pursiness, he abandons his pedestal of universal critic; prostrate he falls to the foreigner; he is down, he is roaring; he is washing his hands of English performances, lends ear to foreign airs, patronises foreign actors, browses on reports from camps of foreign armies.  He drops his head like a smitten ox to all great foreign names, moaning ‘Shakespeare!’ internally for a sustaining apostrophe.  He well-nigh loves his poets, can almost understand what poetry means.  If it does not pay, it brings him fame, respectfulness in times of reverse.  Brains, he is reduced to apprehend, brains are the generators of the conquering energies.  He is now for brains at all costs, he has gained a conception of them.  He is ready to knock knighthood on the heads of men of brains—­even literary brains.  They shall be knights, an ornamental body.  To make them peers, and a legislative, has not struck him, for he has not yet imagined them a stable body.  They require petting, to persuade them to flourish and bring him esteem.