steadily for a couple of weeks, but to discount the coming time is a rash operation. When the Emperor of Ethiopia decreed a week of general enjoyment, in which it would be treason to fret or grow sulky, we know what came of it. I find in a diary of the period that during these two months stringent engagements rained on me. The printers of the Nation threatened a strike if they did not get concessions altogether inordinate; it became suddenly necessary to prevent the collapse of the Library of Ireland by a large loan to the publishers by William Eliot Hudson and myself. Frederick Lucas arrived in Dublin and was entitled to receive prompt personal attention. A more important visitor followed him, Thomas Carlyle, and during the week of his stay in Dublin work was impossible. These claims were met to the best of my ability, but "The Great Popish Rebellion" got neglected. To write history in such an imbroglio indeed was like trying to play a sonata of Beethoven amidst the perpetual din of a quartz mill. When the need arose I rushed into town, and when it was over I rushed back again, but the current of thought was often fatally interrupted. To crown all these perplexities I was suddenly warned that the Nation was, in popular parlance, " losing its head." Wallis, who did not mince matter, assured me that Mitchel was dealing with financial questions in the Nation with a recklessness which was appalling, and with foreign politics in a way that moved the laughter of experts. John O'Hagan, whose opinion was weightier, suggested a more serious alarm. He thought we were misleading the people who trusted us so thoroughly.
"My dear Duffy (he wrote, April 6, 1846),—I sent Mitchel a long essay, and John Pigot sent him one twice as long, upon and against the excessively violent tone of the Nation of late. I can assure you when J. P. and I are unanimous on such a point we are all but certain to be right. I was very glad Pigot wrote, and I think it very likely Mitchel and he agree more in general ways of looking at things than either of them does with me, and I thought he put the case admirably well. But do you agree or differ with us, that is the question? I do assure you I was never more convinced of anything in my life than this, that that tone does no
