Some of Bull's friends advised him to take gentler methods with the young lord, but John naturally loved rough play. It is impossible to express the surprise of the Lord Strutt upon the receipt of this letter. He was not flush in ready either to go to law or clear old debts, neither could he find good bail. He offered to bring matters to a friendly accommodation, and promised, upon his word of honour, that he would not change his drapers; but all to no purpose, for Bull and Frog saw clearly that old Lewis would have the cheating of him.

This is the book which fixed the name and character of John Bull on the English people. Though in one part of the story he is thin and long nosed, as a result of trouble, generally he is suggested to us as "ruddy and plump, with a pair of cheeks like a trumpeter," an honest tradesman, simple and straightforward, easily cheated; but when he takes his affairs into his own hands, acting with good plain sense, knowing very well what he wants done, and doing it.

John Arbuthnot, often known simply as Dr Arbuthnot, (baptised 29 April 1667 – 27 February 1735), was a Scottish[1] physician, satirist and polymath in London. He is best remembered for his contributions to mathematics, his membership in the Scriblerus Club (where he inspired both Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels book III and Alexander Pope's Peri Bathous, Or the Art of Sinking in Poetry, Memoirs of Martin Scriblerus, and possibly The Dunciad), and for inventing the figure of John Bull.