national passion for the land's sake; some men to agrarian passion for the nation's sake; some men to both for their own advancement's sake and this agitation at the time I write of had but old men to serve it who found themselves after years of labour, some after years of imprisonment, derided for unscrupulous rascals. Unscrupulous they certainly were, for they had grown up amid make-believe, and now that their practical grievance was too near settlement not to blind and to excite, that make-believe was visible to all. They were as eloquent as ever, they had never indeed shared anything in common but the sentimental imagery, the poetical allusions inherited from a still earlier generation, but were faced by a generation that had turned against all oratory. I recall to my memory a member of Parliament who had fought for Parnell's policy after Parnell's death, and much against his own interest, who refused to attend a meeting my friends had summoned at the declaration of the Boer War, because he thought "England was in the right" and a week later, when the Dublin mob had taken the matter up, advised the Irish soldiers to shoot their officers and join President Kruger. I recall another and more distinguished politician who supported the Anti-Parnellite Party in his declining years, and in his vigorous years had raked up some scandal about some Colonial Governor. A friend of mine, after advising that Governor's son to write his father's life, had remembered the scandal and called in her alarm upon the politician; "I do beseech you" he had said and with the greatest earnestness "to pay no attention whatever to anything I may have said during an election."
Certain of these men, all public prepossessions laid aside, were excellent talkers, genial and friendly men, with memories enriched by country humour, and much half sentimental, half practical philosophy, and at moments by poetical feeling that was not all an affectation, found very moving by English sympathizers, of the tear and the smile in Erin's eye. They may even have had more sincerity than their sort elsewhere, but they had inherited a cause that men had died for, that they themselves had gone to jail for, and had worn their hereditary martyrdom so that they had seemed for a time no common men, and now must pay the penalty. "I have just told Mahaffy" Wilde had said to me "that it is a party of men of genius" and now John O'Leary, Taylor, and many obscure sincere men had pulled them down, and yet, should what followed, judged by an eye that thinks most of the individual soul, be counted as
