Ulysses
inspection of sterile landscape and contrastingly agreeable
cottagers’ fires of smoking peat turves (period of hiber-
nation). Indoor: discussion in tepid security of unsolved
historical and criminal problems: lecture of unexpurgated
exotic erotic masterpieces: house carpentry with toolbox
containing hammer, awl nails, screws, tintacks, gimlet,
tweezers, bullnose plane and turnscrew. Might he become a
gentleman farmer of field produce and live stock?
Not impossibly, with 1 or 2 stripper cows, 1 pike of
upland hay and requisite farming implements, e.g., an end-
to-end churn, a turnip pulper etc.
What would be his civic functions and social status
among the county families and landed gentry?
Arranged successively in ascending powers of hierarchi-
cal order, that of gardener, groundsman, cultivator, breeder,
and at the zenith of his career, resident magistrate or justice
of the peace with a family crest and coat of arms and appro-
priate classical motto (Semper paratus), duly recorded in the
court directory (Bloom, Leopold P., M. P., P. C., K. P., L. L.
D. (honoris causa), Bloomville, Dundrum) and mentioned
in court and fashionable intelligence (Mr and Mrs Leopold
Bloom have left Kingstown for England).
What course of action did he outline for himself in such
capacity?
A course that lay between undue clemency and exces-
sive rigour: the dispensation in a heterogeneous society of
arbitrary classes, incessantly rearranged in terms of great-
er and lesser social inequality, of unbiassed homogeneous
indisputable justice, tempered with mitigants of the wid-