John Bull

“ The vilest of all the vile papers of that day was the 'John Bull,' now settled down to a quiet periodical. Perhaps the real John Bull, heavy, good-natured lumberer as he is, was never worse represented than in this journal which bore his name, but had little of his kindly spirit. Hook was its originator, and for a long time its main supporter. Scurrility, scandal, libel, baseness of all kinds formed the fuel with which it blazed, and the wit, bitter, unflinching, unsparing, which puffed the flame up, was its chief recommendation. ”

“ When Esquire South has got possession of his title and honour is not John Bull to be his clothier? Who, then, but John ought to put in possession? Ask but any indifferent gentleman, Who ought to bear his charges at law? and he will readily answer, His tradesmen. I do therefore affirm, and I will go to death with it, that, being his clothier, you ought to put him in quiet possession of his estate, and with the same generous spirit you have begun it complete the good work. If you persist in the bad measures you are now in, what must become of the three poor orphans! ”

“ JOHN BULL.—Weak as he was, he called for his long Toledo, swore and bounced about the room: "'Sdeath! what am I come to, to be affronted so by my tradesmen? I know the rascals: my barber, clothier, and linen-draper dispose of my estate! Bring hither my blunderbuss; I'll warrant ye you shall see daylight through them. Scoundrels! dogs! the scum of the earth! Frog, that was my father's kitchen-boy, he pretend to meddle with my estate—with my will! Ah, poor Strutt! what are thou come to at last? Thou hast lived too long in the world, to see thy age and infirmity so despised! ”

“ John Bull, to all appearance, is a plain, downright, matter-of-fact fellow, with much less of poetry about him than rich prose. There is little of romance in his nature, but a vast deal of strong natural feeling. He excels in humor more than in wit; is jolly rather than gay; melancholy rather than morose; can easily be moved to a sudden tear or surprised into a broad laugh; but he loathes sentiment and has no turn for light pleasantry. He is a boon companion, if you allow him in to have his humor and to talk about himself ”

“ The unchanging spirit, then, the bull-dog tenacity, that tremendous grip that never lets go—these British qualities blend and render powerful the Latin temperament, with its quickness of comprehension and adaptability. Slow to see a new fact, still slower to excite himself, John Bull is the ideal character to play the waiting game, that game of exhaustion of the war. The more wonderful, then, in the eyes of the French that he should have made so prodigious a military effort. ”

“ Yet, behold John Bull, junior, on the football ground! The hero of a bad cause, but for all that a hero; a lusty little fellow, fearless, hardy, strong-knit, iron-muscled, and mule-headed, who, rather than let go a ball that he holds firmly in his arms, will perform feats of valor; who, simply to pass this ball between two goals, will grovel in the dust, reckless of lacerated shoulders, a broken rib or jaw-bone, and will die on a bed of suffering with a smile upon his lips if he can only hear, before closing his eyes, that his side has won the game. ”

“ JOHN BULL.—When Frog took possession of anything, it was always said to be for us, and why may not John Bull be us as well as Nic. Frog was us? I hope John Bull is no more confined to singularity than Nic. Frog; or, take it so, the constant doctrine that thou hast preached up for many years was that thou and I are one; and why must we be supposed two in this case, that were always one before? It's impossible that thou and I can fall out, Nic.; we must trust one another. ”

“ You have done much for John Bull, my lord, but you have done it chiefly by being tactful with him, and by not ruffling his susceptibilities. After all, man is a strange being: he clings to the prejudices which makes his life a living purgatory; and you must first see John Bull develop a craving to investigate the ‘hidden garden’ before the final reform of man by man can be effected from within. ”

“ Most characteristic is John Bull the theologian, instinct with heresy and practising compromise; but the rationalistic John Bull is very like him in his alternative way of securing the same supreme object of thinking what he likes to think. In both cases he embraces his opinions much more because they are wholesome and important than because they are certain or clear. Opinions, he feels, should be summary and safe; they should express the lessons of experience.
As he conceives it at first, experience does not merely exist, it teaches. ”

“ On such occasions honest John Bull thinks he does not show the true spirit of liberty, unless he jostles, squeezes, elbows, and pushes his neighbours about as much as possible. Among the Parisian populace, on the contrary, there is a peaceableness of demeanour, a spirit of order, and an endeavour in each individual to accommodate his neighbour, which I confess I thought far more pleasing—shall I not say also more civilized—than honest John’s free-born elbowing and pushing. ”

“ It's a pretty thing, after all, for a man to do his own business; a man has such a tender concern for himself, there's nothing like it. This is somewhat better, I trow, than for John Bull to be standing in the market, like a great dray-horse, with Frog's paws upon his head. What will you give me for this beast? Serviteur Nic. Frog, though John Bull has not read your Aristotles, Platos, and Machiavels, he can see as far into a mill-stone as another." With that John began to chuckle and laugh till he was like to have burst his sides. ”

“ CHAPTER V. The true characters of John Bull, Nic. Frog, and Hocus.* * Characters of the English and Dutch, and the General Duke of Marlborough.
For the better understanding the following history the reader ought to know that Bull, in the main, was an honest, plain-dealing fellow, choleric, bold, and of a very unconstant temper; he dreaded not old Lewis either at back-sword, single falchion, or cudgel-play; but then he was very apt to quarrel with his best friends, especially if they pretended to govern him. If you flattered him you might lead him like a child. ”

“ This was verified in the case of John Bull, who, from an honest and plain tradesman, had got such a haunt about the Courts of Justice, and such a jargon of law words, that he concluded himself as able a lawyer as any that pleaded at the bar or sat on the bench. He was overheard one day talking to himself after this manner: "How capriciously does fate or chance dispose of mankind. How seldom is that business allotted to a man for which he is fitted by Nature. It is plain I was intended for a man of law. How did my guardians mistake my genius in placing me, like a mean slave, behind a counter? ”

“ JOHN BULL.—Every single stone of Ecclesdown Castle, to my own self, speedily?
LEWIS BABOON.—When you please; what needs more words?
JOHN BULL.—But tell me, old boy, hast thou laid aside all thy equivocals and mentals in this case?
LEWIS BABOON.—There's nothing like matter of fact; seeing is believing.
JOHN BULL.—Now thou talkest to the purpose; let us shake hands, old boy. Let me ask thee one question more; what hast thou to do to meddle with the affairs of my family? to dispose of my estate, old boy?
LEWIS BABOON.—Just as much as you have to do with the affairs of Lord Strutt. ”

“ John Bull goes home generally sick of what he has seen, and much more ignorant of the Continent than when he set out. His tour, however, has laid in its stock of foreign affectation, that renders his home uncomfortable; his daughters pine after the flattering familiarities of their whiskered acquaintances at Ems, or Wiesbaden; and his sons lose all zest for the slow pursuit of competence, by reflecting on the more decisive changes of fortune, that await on rouge et noir. ”

“ Of all the strange anomalies of English character, I don’t know one so thoroughly inexplicable as the mystery by which so really independent a fellow as John Bull ought to be—and as he, in nineteen cases out of twenty, is, should be a tuft hunter. ”

“ John Bull is consistently absurd and unjust in all things, and, with all his boasted justice, is the most veritable bully in the world—except, perhaps, his thriving son Jonathan; he would no doubt cut his own smugglers out of any port in the world, and in the same moment would deny the poor Spaniards the right to do the same; for John is a man full of honour and liberality, or a man of neither, just as may suit his own particular purpose for the time ”

“ The quality in his appearance and manners, which first impressed the observer, was refinement—perfect elegance, without the least touch of coxcombry. It had been said of him, that he had brought home the taste in dress of a Parisian, the imaginativeness of a German, and the voice and passion for music of an Italian. Few were admitted to such intimacy with him as to look into the deeper qualities of the mind—but those who were, saw there the sturdy honesty of John Bull, and the courageous heart and independent spirit of his own America. ”

“ And Dan chuckled as he turned towards Lord Somerville.
“How irreverent you are, Dan,” reprovingly said Lionel.
“My lord, you do not know your own countrymen. It is only when a great reform evokes a trivial image in John Bull’s sleepy mind that an Utopian ideal has any power to move him. You see, John Bull is of a homely disposition, and he is very fond of telling you that the surface of our planet and the relations between nations have greatly altered since a man one day watched a kettle simmering. The Bishop knows his own flock well enough, and he leads them with a gentle hand.” ”

“ Odds-blood, an’t I as good a man as Rousterdivel or Lewis Baboon? Though I have not so many game-keepers, yet I have as good clean-made fellows about my farm as he; and if my own children will let me be insulted, it is time that John Bull was gone the way of all flesh.
But what can your children do for you, said they, when your wife, and your nurse, and your steward, will not let one of them touch a gun or a cutlass, and think there is no safety but in the dark cellar, or the coal-hole, when there is any disturbance in the yard. ”

“ It is almost too good to be true, but you are not in the habit of quizzing. The trait is so naturelike and Dickens-like, no American—no living soul but a peppery, crotchety, good-hearted, mellow old John Bull—could have done such a thing. God bless him! Perhaps the verses are not much, and perhaps he is no great judge whether they are or not: but what a pleasant thing it is to win the hearty liking of any honest creature who is neither your relation nor compatriot, and who must fancy what pleases him for itself and nothing else! ”

“ There was no man in the world less subject to rancour than John Bull, considering how often his good nature has been abused; yet I don't know but he was too apt to hearken to tattling people that carry tales between him and his sister Peg, on purpose to sow jealousies and set them together by the ears. They say that there were some hardships put upon Peg which had been better let alone; but it was the business of good people to restrain the injuries on one side and moderate the resentments on the other—a good friend acts both parts, the one without the other will not do. ”

“ The bald-headed, rosy John Bull, steaming with heat, doffs at once the hat which he wore in the street, and, of course, is astounded, if the result prove just what it would be anywhere else,—and if he take cold and get a fever, charges it to the climate, and not to his own stupidity and recklessness. Beside this, foreigners will always insist on carrying their home-habits with them wherever they go, and it is exceedingly difficult to persuade any one that he does not understand the climate better than the Italians themselves, whom he puts down as a poor set of timid ignoramuses. ”

“ But we need not go deeply into a history so fresh in the minds of all, as that blot which shows John Bull himself upholding a wretched dissipated monarch against a wife, who, whatever her faults, was still a woman, and whatever her spirit—for she had much of it, and showed it grandly at need—was still a lady. Suffice it to say that 'John Bull' was the most violent of the periodicals that attacked her, and that Theodore Hook, no Puritan himself, was the principal writer in that paper. ”

“ The fact of the matter is, that from the beginning, John Bull, though possessed of a great reputation for honesty and munificence, has never really been any better than he should be. When he interfered between tyrant and slave, when he went forth to conquer savage persons and to annex savage lands which somehow invariably flowed with milk and honey, he made a point of doing it with the air of a philanthropist, and for centuries the world took him at his own estimate. Even in the late war the great cry was that he did not want gold-mines. As a general rule he never wants anything ”

“ For Lewis Baboon, Master of the Noble Science of Defence.
"SIR.—I understand that you are at this time treating with my friend John Bull, about restoring the Lord Strutt's custom, and besides allowing him certain privileges of parks and fish-ponds; I wonder how you that are a man that knows the world, can talk with that simple fellow. He has been my bubble these twenty years, and to my certain knowledge, understands no more of his own affairs than a child in swaddling clothes. ”