like Pearse and MacDonagh, wrote verse, and it was no better nor worse
than their's were. He had an appetite for quaint and difficult
knowledge. He studied Egyptian and Sanscrit, and distant curious matter
of that sort, and was interested in inventions and the theatre. He was
tried and sentenced and shot.

As to Pearse, I do not know how to place him, nor what to say of him. If
there was an idealist among the men concerned in this insurrection it
was he, and if there was any person in the world less fitted to head an
insurrection it was he also. I never could "touch" or sense in him the
qualities which other men spoke of, and which made him military
commandant of the rising. None of these men were magnetic in the sense
that Mr. Larkin is magnetic, and I would have said that Pearse was less
magnetic than any of the others. Yet it was to him and around him they
clung.

Men must find some centre either of power or action or intellect about
which they may group themselves, and I think that Pearse became the
leader because his temperament was more profoundly emotional than any of
the others. He was emotional not in a flighty, but in a serious way, and
one felt more that he suffered than that he enjoyed.

He had a power; men who came into intimate contact with him began to act
differently to their own desires and interests. His schoolmasters did
not always receive their salaries with regularity. The reason that he
did not pay them was the simple one that he had no money. Given by
another man this explanation would be uneconomic, but from him it was so
logical that even a child could comprehend it. These masters did not
always leave him. They remained, marvelling perhaps, and accepting, even
with stupefaction, the theory that children must be taught, but that no