Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/155

service at home or abroad, does vast disservice with many, and if you look before you, and look at anything but a bloody issue, is not the path to success—but for our views in detail I must refer you to the above-mentioned despatches. I will only add that the last Nation is not much of an improvement. The leader was extremely good, but John Murray's article, though very clever, was shockingly coarse, false, too, in some things (e.g., pretending to cull the phrase 'surpliced ruffians' out of the two or three last weeks' numbers of the Times). Again, Mitchel (I presume) in his article on the Sikhs speaks of the blow which is to destroy the English Empire in the East as likely to -be struck ' nearer home.' Heaven and earth, what is the meaning of this? With about as much practical prospect at present of achieving our liberty by arms—I won't say as of bringing over Stonehenge to the Curragh—but weigh the amount of probability yourself. Are we to vapour in this way? Besides the character it gets us, which materially lessens our utility in other things, it is suggestio falsi to our own people and calculated to mislead and confuse them.

"But what I want specially to say to you is this- You don't write enough yourself. What is that you say? 'You have been busy at your book, and have been out of town.' No excuse, Mr. Caudle; at least, though an excuse for not writing much in the Nation, it is none for omitting it altogether. There was a great deal to be said of a kind which no one could say as well as you. Do you remember me speaking to you when you were here about keeping perpetually hammering at the famine, and the remedies which ought to have been and were not applied? I think there was an opportunity for you of putting the Nation at the head of public opinion in Ireland on that question. Gird yourself to the work and come out with one or two of your most forcible articles.

"You are doing remarkably well in poetry; Mangan is sticking to you like a brick. I think that little translation from the French in the 'Answer to Correspondents ' excessively clever, though the rhymes are somewhat too forced. Apropos of rhymes, MacCarthy in that long poem of his about Ceiman eich, some stanzas of which were exceedingly beautiful, fell