A BOOK OF BULLS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLIX, Issue 14984, 4 May 1912, Page 4 (Supplement)

A BOOK OF BULLS.

ANCIENT AND MODERN SPECIMENS, " Bulls" are a matter of taste, like mixed metaphors, "Bplit infinitives, puns; claret-,, caviare, oysters,, roly-poly . pudding; and indeed, anything at all worth mentioning,, in a world subject to caprice and opinion^

By which we mean simply that, if bulla don't amuse you at birth, you will prob-. ably never get to like them later. We con-, fess that we like them very much—betten than puns; though not, perhaps, so much, as claret and. roly-poly pudding. . > Mr. J. C. Percy shows in his new. book A "Bulls, / Ancient and Modern," * a' very, pretty tafiite'in bulls. ;He has made a. choice collection of the true sort. The true bull 'to our thinking, must .be a phrase containing an absurd self-contradiction phrase flatly unsaying what it began to say. Self-contradiction is the essence of the bull. ■;■■■■ • Of ancient specimens, those of Sir Boyle Roche undoubtedly „ are the choicest. It was he, you remember, who remarked that _ a . man could not be in two places at the Sf®® mQ «ides» J l ®, were a bird." and Afrho. -in ; a rhetorical piece of passion; wanted to know—"Whv should we begear ourselves for posterity? What haTS tenty done for as? - - • 1

These are famous gems. Less known, perhaps, 'is his complaint that the cup, of our-trouble is running over, but alaal is. not yet full." Dreadful, too, was hia picture of the times in which ;he lived—* "Little children who could neither, wait nor talk were running aboot. the streets cursing their Maker." " Many/thousand* of them." he said, too, " were destitute of even tho goods they possessed. .. It wa& when he .was pessimistic that bir IJoylft was, if we may say so, at his Bulliest. Soma of Mr. Percy's bulls are culled from the press. A cycling paper, for instance, advised its readers: " The best way to pass a cow on the road when cycling is to keep behind it," and one, journal <le-. ecribed a summer tour by remarking that, it "selected a shady nook and basked m the sunshine." It also gave someone "a. grand reception as he was going away, v " Gentlemen, please take your, seats till we see how we stand," is a mistake anyone might fall into, and a dangerous tragi Its—- Why should Irishmen stand with their, arms folded and . their/, hands in theiu pockets when England called for aid?'J " Whitebait is my bete noire" is, if we, do not mistake it, bull and pun , combined.. It. is a fine specimen. V *' go is—" I suppose voit think that on out board half ;of the directors do .the work and the other half do nothing. • As a, matter of fact, gentlemen, the reverse is the case," while this, to end with, ; was actually spoken on the 19th day of December last by an Irish shareholder .at aii annual meeting of some company—"l do hope that the passing cloud, which .has. passed over this company, will pass away.".