seedy air. There exists in Dublin no corporate sentiment such as belongs, I fancy, only to places which retain the memory of some good cause which has triumphed there, or of some phase of moral enthusiasm which has been the sanction of subsequent well-being and prosperity. If any place in Dublin was sacrosanct it should have been, one would have thought, the chamber in which its ancient archives were stored. And yet, not many weeks ago, about noon, when we Dublin citizens were at our work, we were shaken by a monstrous explosion, and rushing out of doors soon perceived, under black volumes of smoke rolling seaward, gleaming objects which we rightly surmised to be the shreds of the intimate records of Dublin's life for many hundreds of years, the documents over which Sir Samuel Ferguson had laboured. And this was the deed of no Caliph Omar, but of a patriot who bore the name of Ireland's last monarch, Mr Roderick O'Connor.
Thus it will be understood by the reader who may wish to learn what kind of reception Mr Joyce's Ulysses has found in Dublin, that there is here, as I say, no corporate sentiment likely to take offence at his cruel realism. The book has, in fact, been received with enthusiasm by those who provisionally determine literary fame, in Ireland. "A marvellous book—it has broken up English literature!"—"It puts Ireland at the head of European literature!"—these are some of the phrases in circulation; chiefly among the newly emancipated youth of the National University colleges, who disparage the Protestant-minded Shaw with a whole-heartedness which would satisfy even Mr Ezra Pound, and turn to the pure diabolism of Mr Joyce as to the living waters of a new art. The first was the phrase of a Dublin bookseller who was pleased by the number of orders he had booked. I have heard a highly intelligent Catholic admirer of Mr Joyce express a doubt as to whether any one but a Catholic could really understand the book, and perhaps to savour it perfectly the reader should be a Catholic born and bred in Dublin. Mr Pound however makes light of its difficulties, and several non-Catholics of my acquaintance recognize it as an epoch-making achievement—being chiefly, I must own, of a somewhat malicious turn of mind. For Dublin, I must repeat, is not a nurse of moral enthusiasms. Dublin produces the scholar and the mocker: the scholar, chiefly I think among the descendants of the old Protestant ascendancy, who in these changed times bury themselves in their
