Coldly worshipped on the whole, he can create an enthusiasm when his roast-beef influence mounts up to peaceful skies and the domestic English world spins with him.  What he does not like will then be the forbidding law of a most governable people, what he does like the consenting.  If it is declared that argument will be inefficacious to move him, he is adored in the form of post.  A hint of his willingness in any direction, causes a perilous rush of his devotees.  Nor is there reason to suppose we have drawn the fanatical subserviency from the example of our subject India.  We may deem it native; perhaps of its origin Aryan, but we have made it our own.  Some have been so venturesome as to trace the lordliness of Bull to the protecting smiles of the good Neptune, whose arms are about him to encourage the development of a wanton eccentricity.  Certain weeds of the human bosom are prompt to flourish where safeness would seem to be guaranteed.  Men, for instance, of stoutly independent incomes are prone to the same sort of wilfulness as Bull’s, the salve abject submission to it which we behold in his tidal bodies of supporters.  Neptune has done something.  One thinks he has done much, at a rumour of his inefficiency to do the utmost.  Spy you insecurity?—­a possibility of invasion?  Then indeed the colossal creature, inaccessible to every argument, is open to any suggestion:  the oak-like is a reed, the bull a deer.  But as there is no attack on his shores, there is no proof that they are invulnerable.  Neptune is appealed to and replies by mouth of the latest passenger across the Channel on a windy night:—­Take heart, son John!  They will have poor stomachs for blows who intrude upon you.  The testification to the Sea-God’s watchfulness restores his darling who is immediately as horny to argument as before.  Neptune shall have his share of the honours.

Ideal of his country Bull has none—­he hates the word; it smells of heresy, opposition to his image.  It is an exercise of imagination to accept an ideal, and his digestive organs reject it, after the manner of the most beautiful likeness of him conjurable to the mind—­that flowering stomach, the sea-anemone, which opens to anything and speedily casts out what it cannot consume.  He is a positive shape, a practical corporation, and the best he can see is the mirror held up to him by his bards of the Press and his jester Frank Guffaw.  There, begirt by laughing ocean-waves, manifestly blest, he glorifies his handsome roundness, like that other Foam-Born, whom the decorative Graces robed in vestments not so wonderful as printed sheets.  Rounder at each inspection, he preaches to mankind from the text of a finger curved upon the pattern spectacles.  Your Frenchmen are revolutionising, wagering on tentative politics; your Germans 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.