John Bull is certainly a singular animal. It is the being the beast he is that has made a man of him. If he do not take care what he is about, the same ungoverned humour will be his ruin. He must have something to butt at; and it matters little to him whether it be friend or foe, provided only he can _run-a-muck_. He must have a grievance to solace him, a bugbear of some sort or other to keep himself in breath: otherwise, he droops and hangs the head—he is no longer John Bull, but John Ox, according to a happy allusion of the Poet-Laureate’s. This necessity of John’s to be repulsive (right or wrong) has been lately turned against himself, to the detriment of others, and his proper cost. Formerly, the Pope, the Devil, the Inquisition, and the Bourbons, served the turn, with all of whom he is at present sworn friends, unless Mr. Canning should throw out a _tub to a whale_ in South America: then Bonaparte took the lead for awhile in John’s panic-struck brain; and latterly, the Whigs and the _Examiner_ newspaper have borne the bell before all other topics of abuse and obloquy. Formerly, liberty was the word with John,—now it has become a bye-word. Whoever is not determined to make a slave and a drudge of him, he defies, he sets at, he tosses in the air, he tramples under foot; and after having mangled and crushed whom he pleases, stands stupid and melancholy (_fænum in cornu_) over the lifeless remains of his victim. When his fury is over, he repents of what he has done—too late. In his tame fit, and having made a clear stage of all who would or could direct him right, he is led gently by the nose by Mr. Croker; and the ‘Stout Gentleman’ gets upon his back, making a monster of him. Why is there a tablet stuck up in St. Peter’s at Rome, to the memory of the three last of the Stuarts? Is it a _baisés mains_ to the Pope, or a compromise with legitimacy? Is the dread of usurpation become so strong, that a reigning family are half-ready to acknowledge themselves usurpers, in favour of those who are not likely to come back to assert their claim, and to countenance the principles that may keep them on a throne, in lieu of the paradoxes that placed them there? It is a handsome way of paying for a kingdom with an epitaph, and of satisfying the pretensions of the living and the dead. But we did not expel the slavish and tyrannical Stuarts from our soil by the volcanic eruption of 1688, to send a whining Jesuitical recantation and _writ of error_ after them to the other world a hundred years afterwards. But it may be said that the inscription is merely a tribute of respect to misfortune. What! from that quarter? No! it is a ‘lily-livered,’ polished, courtly, pious monument to the fears that have so long beset the hearts of Monarchs, to the pale apparitions of Kings dethroned or beheaded in time past or to come (from that sad example) to the crimson flush of victory, which has put out the light of truth, and to the reviving hope of that deathless night of ignorance and superstition, when they shall once more reign as Gods upon the earth, and make of their enemies their footstool! Foreigners cannot comprehend this bear-garden work of ours at all: they ‘perceive a fury, but nothing wherefore.’ They cannot reconcile the violence of our wills with the dulness of our apprehensions, nor account for the fuss we make about nothing; our convulsions and throes without end or object, the pains we take to defeat ourselves and others, and to undo all that we have ever done, sooner than any one else should share the benefit of it. They think it is strange, that out of mere perversity and contradiction we would rather be slaves ourselves, than suffer others to be free; that we _back_ out of our most heroic acts and disavow our favourite maxims (the blood-stained devices in our national coat of arms) the moment we find others disposed to assent to or imitate us, and that we would willingly see the last hope of liberty and independence extinguished, sooner than give the smallest credit to those who sacrifice every thing to keep the spark alive, or abstain from joining in every species of scurrility, insult, and calumny against them, if the word is once given by the whippers-in of power. The English imagination is not _riante_: it inclines to the gloomy and morbid with a heavy instinctive bias, and when fear and interest are thrown into the scale, down it goes with a vengeance that is not to be resisted, and from the effects of which it is not easy to recover. The enemies of English liberty are aware of this weakness in the public mind, and make a notable use of it.