Without the Welsh, Irish, Scot; in their composition, there would not be
much of the yeasty ferment: but it should not be forgotten that Welsh,
Irish, Scot, are now largely of their numbers; and the taste for
elegance, and for spiritual utterance, for Song, nay, for Ideas, is there
among them, though it does not everywhere cover a rocky surface to
bewitch the eyes of aliens;--like Louise de Seilles and Dr. Schlesien,
for example; aliens having no hostile disposition toward the people they
were compelled to criticize; honourably granting, that this people has a
great history. Even such has the Lion, with Homer for the transcriber of
his deeds. But the gentle aliens would image our emergence from wildness
as the unsocial spectacle presented by the drear menagerie Lion, alone or
mated; with hardly an animated moment save when the raw red joint is
beneath his paw, reminding him of the desert's pasture.

Nevertheless, where Strength is, there is hope:--it may be said more
truly than of the breath of Life; which is perhaps but the bucket of
breath, muddy with the sediment of the well: whereas we have in Strength
a hero, if a malefactor; whose muscles shall haul him up to the light he
will prove worthy of, when that divinity has shown him his uncleanness.
And when Strength is not exercising, you are sure to see Satirists jump
on his back. Dozens, foreign and domestic, are on the back of Old
England; a tribute to our quality if at the same time an irritating
scourge. The domestic are in excess; and let us own that their view of
the potentate, as an apathetic beast of power, who will neither show the
power nor woo the graces; pretending all the while to be eminently above
the beast, and posturing in an inefficient mimicry of the civilized,
excites to satire. Colney Durance had his excuses. He could point to
the chief creative minds of the country for generations, as beginning
their survey genially, ending venomously, because of an exasperating
unreason and scum in the bubble of the scenes, called social, around