mere commentators upon events, manage somehow to keep up the sale of their journals:  advertisements do not flow and ebb with them as under the influence of a capricious moon.  Ah, what a public!  Serve it honourably, you are in peril of collapsing:  show it nothing but the likeness of its dull animal face, you are steadily inflated.  These reflections within us!  Might not one almost say that the retreat for the prophet is the wilderness, far from the hustled editor’s desk; and annual should be the uplifting of his voice instead of diurnal, if only to spare his blood the distemper?  A fund of gout was in Rockney’s, and he had begun to churn it.  Between gouty blood and luminous brain the strife had set in which does not conduce to unwavering sobriety of mind, though ideas remain closely consecutive and the utterance resonant.

Never had he been an adulator of Bull.  His defects as well as his advantages as a politician preserved to him this virtue.  Insisting on a future, he could not do homage to the belying simulacrum of the present.  In the season of prosperity Rockney lashed the old fellow with the crisis he was breeding for us; and when prostration ensued no English tongue was loftier in preaching dignity and the means of recovery.  Our monumental image of the Misuse of Peace he pointed out unceasingly as at a despot constructed by freemen out of the meanest in their natures to mock the gift of liberty.  His articles of foregone years were an extraordinary record of events or conditions foreseen:  seductive in the review of them by a writer who has to be still foreseeing:  nevertheless, that none of them were bardic of Bull, and that our sound man would have acted wisely in heeding some of the prescriptions, constituted their essential merit, consolatory to think of, though painful.  The country has gone the wrong road, but it may yet cross over to the right one, when it perceives that we were prophetic.

Compared with the bolts discharged at Bull by Rockney’s artillery, Captain Con O’Donnell’s were popgun-pellets.  Only Rockney fired to chasten, Con O’Donnell for a diversion, to appease an animus.  The revolutionist in English journalism was too devoutly patriotic to belabour even a pantomime mask that was taken as representative of us for the disdainful fun of it.  Behind the plethoric lamp, now blown with the fleshpots, now gasping puffs of panic, he saw the well-minded valorous people, issue of glorious grandsires; a nation under a monstrous defacement, stupefied by the contemplation of the mask:  his vision was of the great of old, the possibly great in the graver strife ahead, respecters of life, despisers of death, the real English whereas an alienated Celtic satirist, through his vivid fancy and his disesteem, saw the country incarnate in Bull, at most a roguish screw-kneed clown to be whipped out of him.  Celt and Saxon are much inmixed with us, but the prevalence of Saxon blood is evinced by the public disregard of