continuity of purpose; they are roughly hammered links in a chain of
unequal workmanship, but stretching back through the centuries to the
Munster poets of the days of Elizabeth, advised by Spenser to harry
them out of Ireland. The names change from age to age, that is all.
The verses of the seventeenth century hallow those of MacCarthys and
Fitzgeralds who fought for the Stuarts or "knocked obedience out of
the Gall"; the eighteenth ended with the rebels of '98; the nineteenth
had Emmet and Mitchell and its Manchester martyrs. Already in these
early days of the twentieth the street singers cry out:

Mac Dermott, Mallin, Hanrahan, Daly, Colbert and Mac Bride
All men who for our country's cause have nobly bled and died.

Even Yeats, falling into the tradition, has put in a lyric the names
of some of those who died in Easter week, and through whose death "a
terrible beauty is born."




II


I am glad to remember that through the twelve years of our married
life, 1880-92, my husband and his people were able to keep their liking
and respect for each other. For those were the years of the land war,
tenant struggling to gain a lasting possession for his children,
landlord to keep that which had been given in trust to him for his;
each ready in his anger to turn the heritage of the other to
desolation; while the vision of some went yet farther, through breaking