prophet speaking to a council of degenerate princes. When the
aristocracy failed Ireland he bade them farewell, and wrote the
epitaph of their class in words whose scorn we almost forget
because of their sounding melody and beauty. He turned his mind
to the problems of democracy and more especially of those workers
who are trapped in the city, and he pointed out for them the way
of escape and how they might renew life in the green fields close
to Earth, their ancient mother and nurse. He used too exalted a
language for those to whom he spoke to understand, and it might
seem that all these vehement appeals had failed but that we know
that what is fine never really fails. When a man is in advance
of his age, a generation, unborn when he speaks, is born in due
time and finds in him its inspiration. O'Grady may have failed
in his appeal to the aristocracy of his own time but he may yet
create an aristocracy of character and intellect in Ireland. The
political and economic writings will remain to uplift and inspire
and to remind us that the man who wrote the stories of heroes had
a bravery of his own and a wisdom of his own. I owe so much to
Standish O'Grady that I would like to leave it on record that it
was he made me conscious and proud of my country, and recalled to
my mind, that might have wandered otherwise over too wide and
vague a field of thought, to think of the earth under my feet and
the children of our common mother. There hangs in the Municipal
Gallery of Dublin the portrait of a man with melancholy eyes, and
scrawled on the canvas is the subject of his bitter brooding: "'The
Lost Land." I hope that O'Grady will find before he goes back to
Tir na noge that Ireland has found again through him what seemed
lost for ever, the law of its own being, and its memories which go
back to the beginning of the world.