success, and the infamy of the transaction referred to was made known to tue English people for the first time. From the press gallery kindly eyes were looking down on the contest. Edward Whitty wrote me a hasty note:

"Your quiet and respectful mannerbut self-possessed and dogged-saved you, for manner is everything. Your walk out of the House was a stroll-a splendid coup. Unbounded admiration was general in the gallery. In my time no man ever went through such a scene. I am happy in thinking you have a fine adviser in Shee. Lucas behaved like a hero. The House has been idiotic-keep it in the wrong."

In Ireland the conflict created an enthusiasm which has long faded into obscurity, but the contemporary letters and journals were full of it, and a letter from Dublin, when one makes allowance for the undue kindness of the writer, will help to realize it.

"We are all proud and gratified-I cannot tell you how much-at what has happened. And Dublin has fairly for gotten the exhibition for the last two days. Passing any group on Saturday or yesterday in the streets, one was sure to hear something about Gavan Duffy. And there has been no attempt even to deny that you did the thing bravely, skilfully and successfully. The Four Courts gossip on Saturday freely admitted so much. . . . Nothing has happened that will so much damn the opposite faction. There is a great deal of dishonest twaddle that people might have listened to here, but this scene has given them an actual insight into the House. I have heard no one speak of it who did not utter himself as if it had passed under his own eyes. . . . After Keogh's talk about men who would slink before him in London, though they ranted and wrote here, it happens well and timely. The scene makes you the most popular man in Ireland. It is high access of faith and courage to the poor country, too."

Mr. Gladstone's Budget passed, but it may be safely surmised that none of the parties to that baneful

measure

realized all its disastrous consequences. Mr. Gladstone must have known that he was imposing a heavy burthen upon Ireland, but he had not yet awakened from the delusion common to his class since the Norman conquest, that dependencies and colonies, partners and allies, existed mainly for the benefit of England. He was far from divining that he was inflicting a blow upon Ireland nearly as fatal as the Union. The unfortunate Irish deserters could not fail to know that they were abetting a wrong to their nauve country for their personal benefit. But it is probable that none of them knew that from that hour prosperity and contentment became impossible, that to every class and every man, not an official paid from the English treasury, life would become a constant struggle, and that there would be carried out of the country yearly the profits of industry on which States thrive, and that public tranquillity, which is the balsam of life, would become impossible. The reader is invited to note that that popular Budget originated the most serious part of the injustice disclosed by the royal commission on the financial relations of Great Britain and Ireland which is occupying Parliament and the press while these pages are being written. The wrong it discloses is not a sentimental grievance which may be dismissed with other forgotten wrongs belonging to the dead past, but a practical one altogether outside of party, and which will largely determine the future fortune of the country.

The vote of the Irish members on the income-tax satisfied the government they had nothing to fear from those gentlemen; the result was prompt and decisive. Lord Palmerston told the select committee on the land bills that he saw no necessity for any legislation on the question. Next day Crawford's Bill was set aside by nineteen to nine. Mr. Napier's Bills were next taken in hand and carefully pruned. The Tenants' Compensation Bill, as it left the committee, ignored Ulster tenant-right and denied compensation for the class of improvements most commonly made

in Ireland. The country had been rendered habitable by an industry like that which raised Venice on a quagmire or Holland on a sandbank; yet all improvements more than twenty years in existence were confiscated. Inordinate rents had, as we know, created habitual arrears; in former measures a landlord ejecting a tenant was enabled to set off these arrears against any claims for compensation, but the modified bill went a step farther, and declared that if a tenant was ejected for non-payment of rent or arrears he should not be entitled to compensation for any improvements whatever.

Half-a-dozen by-elections occurred shortly afterwards; three seats were vacated on petition by election committees. In two of them the late members who had deserted with Mr. Keogh presented themselves for re-election and were chosen. At Sligo, where an English gentleman had lost his seat on petition, Mr. John Sadleir presented himself, was proposed by the parish priest and supported by the bishop, and got elected. In every constituency there was a group of manly, resolute priests and farmers who stood by the League, but they were warned that the hand of episcopal authority would fall heavy upon them.

Let me relieve the painful monotony of these disasters by some social details from my diary:

"I dined at John Brady's, to meet Sheridan Knowles, and had a long talk with the poet. He has a brow somewhat retreating, but expressive eyes and a sweet pleasant mouth. He was accompanied by his wife, a lady who is too aggressively pious for social enjoy ment, and constantly whips the poor man up to his Thirty-nine Articles, When the ladies vanished, Knowles talked in the most frank and cordial

manner. He was a professor of rhetoric in the Belfast Institution twenty years ago, and had had Emerson Tennant, Thomas O'Hagan, and Joseph Napier, all now eminent men, for pupils, and they profited by his teaching. He had trained them, he said, in effective elocution, an art without which

good speaking and good reading were impossible, but which any man might learn at any age. His dearest friend in Belfast was John Lawless-Jack Lawless, the Catholic agitator. Lawless was the soul of honor, always interesting and exhilarating, and sometimes exhibiting unexpectedly sound judgment. But the Athens of Ireland was an exile for a man of literary tastes. In London his best friend was William Hazlitt. He owed more to Hazlitt than he could express for early counsel and encouragement. But for him he would probably never have been a dramatist. But it would not have much mattered. Marston's 'Patrician's Daughter' contained more poetry than all his own dramas. Hazlitt's one weakness was that he would not bear contradiction. I said Hazlitt was one of my earliest masters in literature, a man of wide and strikingly original powers; but what a fate he had endured!-slandered by the Blackwood his usual associates, and recognized for gang, patronized by his inferiors among what he really was by scarcely any compeer except Charles Lamb. 'Yes,' Knowles said, 'and Lamb was a Tory who did not share any of his opinions.' I mentioned that Horne, the author of 'Orion,' told me that, having a strong desire to see Hazlitt after his death, as he had not been fortunate enough to see him before, he visited the house where he died. The body was lying on an old piano, covered with a sheet pas trop propre, and there was not a human being in attendance on a man who had done more for popular liberty and the personal freedom which is the cream of liberty than any of the Broughams or Jeffreys who had been swathed in patrician robes or seated in some high fauteuil. 'Yes,' Knowles said, 'one thing a man had better make up his mind to the rewards in public life rarely fall to the generous workers, and what he said about elocution, I said I never to the pioneers.' Recurring to could not help thinking that it was useless to teach elocution to any man whom nature had not equipped with the necessary organization. I had taken lessons from a friend of his, Moore Stack, who had played in 'John of Procida' and

some other of Knowles's dramas, but all I learned was to enjoy dramatic poetry more keenly. Moore, he said-for that was the name he was known by on the stage-would have been one of the finest actors in England if he had persisted. But one must respect his motives; he had religious scruples, because the Catholic Church censured the stage. Knowles told us that he himself had latterly taken to preaching (under the influence of madame, we may surmise) in a Baptist chapel, and was to hold forth that night. Our host proposed that we should adjourn from the table to the tabernacle and bring back Knowles to supper. The service was startling, stretching to the very borders of melodrama; in the prayer, the preacher held a colloquy with his Creator which was probably unique in pulpit oratory. 'O God,' he said, 'who hast graciously selected Thy servant to do Thy work, and peremptorily drawn him away from the fascinating pleasures of this world for Thy service, be pleased to ordain,' etc. I never heard Mr. Knowles again!"

I shall not obtrude into this sketch of transactions in the House of Commons the proceedings which in Ireland undermine the authority of the party of independent opposition. All the landed gentry, the coalition government, the majority of the Irish bishops under the influence of Dr. Cullen, Archbishop of Dublin and papal delegate, were opposed to them at every point, and, under the influence of the latter, priests who had given an active assistance to the League were directed to abstain from politics. As this order was considered ultra vires, an appeal to the pope against the archbishop was carried to Rome by Frederick Lucas, but the appeal was not successful; the Irish party were beaten at every point by those upon whom they were entitled to rely. To win the Irish constituencies without the help of the local clergy was as hopeless as it would have been for the Stuart pretenders to raise the Highlands without the help of the local chiefs.

When Parliament met the natural consequences followed. The government were asked, on behalf of Mr. Napier, what they had done with his bills, of which they had taken possesVOL. XV. 796

LIVING AGE.

sion. Lord John Russell, in the slow and discontented drawl which was his ordinary method, declared that nothing had been done because it was not desirable to do anything. The lord lieutenant and other persons in Ireland, with the best information, assured him that there was no longer need for legislation; there was a good harvest; a friendly feeling existed between landlord and tenant; and the question was settling itself. On the face of God's earth there was not a country so miserable and hopeless as Ireland at that time. The population were flowing out of it like water from a vessel which had been staved. The workhouses were crammed with inmates stricken with the diseases that spring from want and neglect; the landlords were still levelling homesteads and rooting out the native race; and nothing was to be done for remedy or alleviation. Nothing was to be done, and three-fourths of the representatives elected by the stricken people assented in silence, and threefourths of the bishops, born and bred among them, sanctioned the perfidy.

Against all these reverses fortune supplied one signal set-off. In Mr. Sadleir's contest for Carlow, Mr. Dowling, an elector who refused to support him, and threatened to canvass his tenants against him, was arrested by one of Sadleir's election agents on his way to the hustings and carried to the local office of the Tipperary Bank. There were bills of his in the bank which had not come to maturity, and he had given to a friend who endorsed them a bond as a counter-security. On this unripe bond he was arrested. As no attorney could sign the certificate in such a transaction without risk of being struck off the roll, the name of a dying attorney was forged to the instrument. In these proceedings it was proved that Mr. Sadleir had intervened, not merely through agents, but personally by direction and assistance. When he came to be examined, however, he denied everything and repudiated everybody, but the jury disbelieved him, and found a verdict for the plaintiff. When the news was flashed throughout the empire the sensation was intense. One of the queen's government directing a fraudulent arrest, supported by deliberate

stooped, and carefully lifting his friend, set him squarely on his left shoulder, instructed him to put his right arm well about his neck, grasped his feet firmly, and taking his cane from him, set forth with long and easy strides.

"This is the pleasantest way of getting on in the world I have tried yet," cried the jolly little fellow, entering heartily into the humor of the situation. The streets were deserted, and in a short half hour the two comrades had left the town and were out in the fields and lanes, where the moon cast a white radiance over houses and cottages, and silvered all the landscape. The peaceful beauty of the night enthralled them, and neither felt the need of speech. From time to time the dyarf whistled softly, no song or melody, but musical notes, now high, now low, like some bird tilting on a wind-tossed bough and singing because it must.

The whistler ceased suddenly as his conductor turned abruptly into a grove of firs whose tall branches shut out the moonlight, and Magnus, thinking that perhaps his little friend needed some diversion up aloft there in the dark, entereu into an account of his melancholy life; telling how, after his mother's death, he had had a large sign printed announcing that the performance would be discontinued; had then buried the body at midnight, sent the personal effects to a charity hospital, packed his own belongings in a knapsack, and turned his back on the town-his sole thought to lose sight at once and forever of the spot where he had endured such ignominy. The last weeks of his public appearance-"in the pillory," as he termed it had provided him with means for present support. The small fortune left him by his parents he had deposited in a bank. In truth, this legacy weighed heavily on his conscience and he had vowed to touch it only at the sorest need. So then he had begun his wandering life, walking only in the friendly night, and avoiding the dwellings of men. In a week he had grown weary of this irregular mode of existence with uncertain shelter and insufficient food, and, reaching this part of the country he had, late one evening,

chanced upon a lonely farmhouse where sat a peasant and his wife before the door. To these simple folk he told his story, and asked if they could not for the night at least give him a place to sleep; on the morrow he would seek more permanent lodging. The man and his wife, distrustful yet not unfeeling, led him to a large walled-in enclosure about a gunshot from their cottage. This, they told him, was a deserted brick-kiln; the owner had been burnt out and, finding a better spot nearer the town had not taken the trouble to rebuild. Doubtless he would be glad to have a tenant for the blackened walls. he could no longer use.

"And there I have remained," continued Magnus, "although it is a bare, cheerless hole. But there are no louts to stare at me open-mouthed, and I have a friendly hand near by in case of need. The peasant and his wife have kept my secret well. Fancy, their servants and children do not dream that the deserted kiln has an occupant, and my only intercourse with the world is through my good neighbors. What provisions I need they bring me, and they would bite their tongues off rather than betray to any one the whereabouts of the once famous 'big Christopher.' My wants are few, what I want least of all is association with my brother-man-who fails to understand me. For many years I have not had the least desire to venture near the town. I have always feared coming into collision with the police; but up to the present time the head of the department, a humane man, is the only one of the force who knows of my existence, and to him I wrote and gave an account of myself. My main care, naturally, is to avoid all sight of my fellows during the day. When the world is asleep I ramble up hill and down. Sometimes when the weather is particularly bad I tempt fortune and wander about the town. Yesterday night was one of those occasions, and it gave me the pleasure of your acquaintance."

"And how do you pass the weary time, my friend?" whispered the little confidant.

"During the day I sleep mostly. At night I do all sorts of work-for I have