regard them with feelings which were paternal. Among the letters which reached me at the last moment was a welcome one from Charles Kingsley, the friend of all who suffered in a good cause. 'Let me say goodbye,' he said, 'to a man whom (deeply differing from him on many points) I have long admired for his talent and fearlessness, even where I thought those great powers misapplied. However, what is past is past; you are going now to a more wholesome atmosphere, there to mix with social problems more simple than those of this complicated and diseased Old World. I almost envy you. Yet I seem to see here still work to be done which I can do, though on the future of England and of Europe I look with sad and shuddering forebodings. Yet we must have courage. "God is the King" after all, and Right must conquer at last, not perhaps in the way which you or I might make out, but in some wider, deeper way.'
"And a final farewell from Mary Howitt:—
"'You must, dear Mr. Duffy, take with you our best and kindest wishes to the Antipodes. I think of your speaking of the woes of old Ireland with deep emotion, and I trust that God will give you a beautiful and a happy home in the new world of Australia, and that though you never can forget the old land of so many sorrows, yet that the new one may afford you and your children such abundant joy and comfort as may make the day you set foot on its shores the most fortunate day of your life.'"
These sympathisers were all Liberals, but it touched me keenly to have the good word of a Conservative who judged what was done and projected by quite another standard. Emerson Tennant wrote to me:—
"And here let me say that I think in the management of the Nation you have done more than any living man, Moore only excepted, to elevate the national feeling of Irishmen. I don't talk of your energies in pursuit of a brilliant delusion; but I refer to the lofty spirit which has characterised that pursuit, to the bursts of eloquence and flashes of true poetry which have accompanied it, and to the pure and lofty, and at the same time gentle feeling which you have evoked in the struggle. The Nation has exhibited the genius of Ireland in. new and unlooked-for phase."
