must come before all true thought and emotion. A zealous Irishman,
especially if he lives much out of Ireland, spends his time in a
never-ending argument about Oliver Cromwell, the Danes, the penal laws,
the rebellion of 1798, the famine, the Irish peasant, and ends by
substituting a traditional casuistry for a country; and if he be a
Catholic, yet another casuistry that has professors, schoolmasters,
letter-writing priests, and the authors of manuals to make the meshes
fine, comes between him and English literature, substituting arguments
and hesitations for the excitement at the first reading of the great
poets which should be a sort of violent imaginative puberty. His
hesitations and arguments may have been right, the Catholic philosophy
may be more profound than Milton's morality, or Shelley's vehement
vision; but none the less do we lose life by losing that recklessness
Castiglione thought necessary even in good manners, and offend our Lady
Truth, who would never, had she desired an anxious courtship, have digged
a well to be her parlour.

I admired though we were always quarrelling on some matter, J.F. Taylor,
the orator, who died just before the first controversy over these plays.
It often seemed to me that when he spoke Ireland herself had spoken, one
got that sense of surprise that comes when a man has said what is
unforeseen because it is far from the common thought, and yet obvious
because when it has been spoken, the gate of the mind seems suddenly to
roll back and reveal forgotten sights and let loose lost passions. I have
never heard him speak except in some Irish literary or political society,
but there at any rate, as in conversation, I found a man whose life was a
ceaseless reverie over the religious and political history of Ireland. He
saw himself pleading for his country before an invisible jury, perhaps of
the great dead, against traitors at home and enemies abroad, and a sort
of frenzy in his voice and the moral elevation of his thoughts gave him