This is Mr. Bull, our image before the world, whose pranks are passed as though the vivid display of them had no bad effect on the nation.  Doubtless the perpetual mirror, the slavish mirror, is to blame, but his nakedness does not shrink from the mirror, he likes it and he is proud of it.  Beneath these exhibitions the sober strong spirit of the country, unfortunately not a prescient one, nor an attractively loveable, albeit of a righteous benevolence, labours on, doing the hourly duties for the sake of conscience, little for prospective security, little to win affection.  Behold it as the donkey of a tipsy costermonger, obedient to go without the gift of expression.  Its behaviour is honourable under a discerning heaven, and there is ever something pathetic in a toilful speechlessness; but it is of dogged attitude in the face of men.  Salt is in it to keep our fleshly grass from putrefaction; poets might proclaim its virtues.  They will not; they are averse.  The only voice it has is the Puritan bray, upon which one must philosophise asinically to unveil the charm.  So the world is pleased to let it be obscured by the paunch of Bull.  We have, however, isolated groups, individuals in all classes, by no means delighting in his representation of them.  When such is felt to be the case among a sufficient number, his bards blow him away as a vapour; we hear that he is a piece of our English humour—­we enjoy grotesques and never should agree to paint ourselves handsome:  our subtle conceit insists on the reverse.  Nevertheless, no sooner are the hours auspicious to fatness than Bull is back on us; he is our family goat, ancestral ghost, the genius of our comfortable sluggishness.  And he is at times a mad Bull:  a foaming, lashing, trampling, horn-driving, excessive, very parlous Bull.  It is in his history that frenzies catch him, when to be yoked to him is to suffer frightful shakings, not to mention a shattering of our timbers.  It is but in days of the rousing of the under-spirit of the country, days of storm imprudent to pray the advent of, that we are well rid of him for a while.  In the interim he does mischief, serious mischief; he does worse than when, a juvenile, he paid the Dannegelt for peace.  Englishmen of feeling do not relish him.  For men with Irish and Cambrian blood in their veins the rubicund grotesque, with his unimpressionable front and his noisy benevolence of the pocket, his fits of horned ferocity and lapses of hardheartedness, is a shame and a loathing.  You attach small importance to images and symbols; yet if they seem representative, and they sicken numbers of us, they are important.  The hat we wear, though it is not a part of the head, stamps the character of our appearance and has a positive influence on our bearing.  Symbolical decorations will stimulate the vacant-minded to act up to them, they encircle and solidify the mass; they are a sword of division between Celts and Saxons if they are abhorrent