"more hopeful, positive, and consoling" than the subject of the
earlier book.

A visit to Derbyshire in the autumn gave me some of the setting for the
story. Then I took the first chapters abroad during the winter to
Valescure, and worked them in that fragrant, sunny spot, making
acquaintance the while with a new and delightful friend, Emily Lawless,
the author of _Hurrish_ and _Grania_, and of some few poems that
deserve, I think, a long life in English anthologies. She and her most
racy, most entertaining mother, old Lady Cloncurry, were spending the
winter at Valescure, and my young daughter and I found them a great
resource. Lady Cloncurry, who was a member of an old Galway family, the
Kirwans of Castle Hackett, seemed to me a typical specimen of those
Anglo-Irish gentry who have been harshly called the "English garrison"
in Ireland, but who were really in the last century the most natural and
kindly link between the two countries. So far as I knew them, they loved
both, with a strong preference for Ireland. All that English people
instinctively resent in Irish character--its dreamy or laughing
indifference toward the ordinary business virtues, thrift, prudence,
tidiness, accuracy--they had been accustomed to, even where they had not
been infected with it, from their childhood. They were not Catholics,
most of them, and, so far as they were landlords, the part played by the
priests in the Land League agitation tried them sore. But Miss Lawless's
_Grania_ is there to show how delicate and profound might be their
sympathy with the lovely things in Irish Catholicism, and her best
poems--"The Dirge of the Munster Forest" and "After Aughrim"--give a
voice to Irish suffering and Irish patriotism which it would be hard to
parallel in the Nationalist or rebel literature of recent years. The
fact that they had both nations in their blood, both patriotisms in
their hearts, infused a peculiar pathos often into their lives.