ften
interrupted our discussion of rules, or of the merit of this or that
lecturer, and were so aggravated and crossed by the current wrangle
between Parnellite and anti-Parnellite that they delayed our public
appearance for a year. Other excited persons, doubtless, seeing that we
are of a race intemperate of speech, had looked up from their rancours to
the dead Lord Mayors upon the wall, superior men whose like we shall not
see again, but never, I think, from rancours so seemingly academic. I was
preparing the way without knowing it for a great satirist and master of
irony, for master works stir vaguely in many before they grow definite in
one man's mind, and to help me I had already flitting through my head,
jostling other ideas and so not yet established there, a conviction that
we should satirize rather than praise, that original virtue arises from
the discovery of evil. If we were, as I had dreaded, declamatory, loose,
and bragging, we were but the better fitted, that once declared and
measured, to create unyielding personality, manner at once cold and
passionate, daring long premeditated act; and if bitter beyond all the
people of the world, we might yet lie, that too declared and measured,
nearest the honeyed comb:--

"Like the clangour of a bell
Sweet and harsh, harsh and sweet,
That is how he learnt so well
To take the roses for his meat."

IV

There were others with followers of their own, and too old or indifferent
to join our society. Old men who had never accepted Young Ireland, or
middle-aged men kept by some family tradition to the school of thought
before it arose, to the Ireland of Daniel O'Connell and of Lever and of
Thomas Moore, convivial Ireland with the traditional tear and smile. They
sang Moore's _Melodies_, admitted no poetry but his, and resented Young
Ireland's political objections to it as much as my generation's objection
to its artificial and easy rhythm; one, an old commercial traveller, a
Gaelic scholar who kept an erect head and the animal vigour of youth,
frequented the houses of our leading men, and would say in a loud voice,
"Thomas Moore, sir, is the greatest heroic poet of ancient or modern
times." I think it was the Fire Worshippers in _Lalla Rookh_ that he
preferred to Homer; or, jealous for the music of the _Melodies_, denounce
Wagner, then at the top of his vogue; "I would run ten miles through a bog
to escape him," he would cry. Then there was a maker of tombstone