them for their shyness of it, telling them he doubts them true poets while they abstain from singing him to the world-him, and the things refreshing the centre of him.  Ineffectual is that encouragement.  Were he in the fire, melting to the iron man, the backbone of him, it would be different.  At his pleasures he is anti-hymnic, repellent to song.  He has perceived the virtues of Peace, without the brother eye for the need of virtuousness to make good use of them and inspire the poet.  His own enrolled unrhythmical bardic troops (humorous mercenaries when Celts) do his trumpeting best, and offend not the Pierides.

This interlude, or rather inter-drone, repulsive to write, can hardly be excluded from a theme dramatising Celtic views, and treating of a blood, to which the idea of country must shine resplendently if we would have it running at full tide through the arteries.  Preserve your worship, if the object fills your optics.  Better worship that than nothing, as it is better for flames to be blown out than not to ascend, otherwise it will wreak circular mischief instead of illumining.  You are requested simply to recollect that there is another beside you who sees the object obliquely, and then you will not be surprised by his irreverence.  What if, in the end, you were conducted to a like point of view?  Self-worship, it has been said, is preferable to no trimming of the faculty, but worship does not necessarily cease with the extinction of this of the voraciously carnal.  An ideal of country, of Great Britain, is conceivable that will be to the taste of Celt and Saxon in common, to wave as a standard over their fraternal marching.  Let Bull boo his drumliest at such talk:  it is, I protest, the thing we want and can have.  He is the obstruction, not the country; and against him, not against the country, the shots are aimed which seem so malignant.  Him the gay manipulators propitiate who look at him through Literature and the Press, and across the pulpit-cushions, like airy Macheath at Society, as carrion to batten on.  May plumpness be their portion, and they never hanged for it!  But the flattering, tickling, pleasantly pinching of Bull is one of those offices which the simple starveling piper regards with afresh access of appetite for the well-picked bone of his virtue.  That ghastly apparition of the fleshly present is revealed to him as a dead whale, having the harpoon of the inevitable slayer of the merely fleshly in his oils.  To humour him, and be his piper for his gifts, is to descend to a carnival deep underneath.  While he reigns, thinks this poor starveling, Rome burns, or the explosive powders are being secretly laid.  He and his thousand Macheaths are dancing the country the giddy pace, and there will, the wretch dreads, be many a crater of scoria in the island, before he stretches his inanimate length, his parasites upon him.  The theme is chosen and must be treated as a piper involved in his virtue conceives it:  that is, realistically; not with Bull’s