ungainly body in unsuitable, badly-fitting clothes,
and heard an excited voice speaking ill of this man or that other. We knew
that he could never give us that one price we would accept, that he would
never find a practicable policy; that no party would admit, no government
negotiate with, a man notorious for a temper, that, if it gave him genius,
could at times carry him to the edge of insanity.

Born in some country town, the son of some little watchmaker, he had been
a shop assistant, put himself to college and the bar, learned to speak at
temperance meetings and Young Ireland societies, and was now a Queen's
Counsel famous for his defence of country criminals, whose cases had
seemed hopeless--Taylor's boys, their neighbours called them or they
called themselves. He had shaped his style and his imagination from
Carlyle, the chief inspirer of self-educated men in the 'eighties and
early 'nineties. "I prefer Emerson's _Oversoul_," the Condalkin cobbler
said to me, "but I always read Carlyle when I am wild with the
neighbours"; but he used his master's style, as Mitchell had done before,
to abase what his master loved, to exalt what his master scorned. His
historical erudition seemed as vast as that of York Powell, but his
interests were not Powell's, for he had no picture before the mind's eye,
and had but one object--a plea of not guilty--entered in his country's
name before a jury which he believed to be packed. O'Leary cared nothing
for his country's glory, its individuality alone seemed important in his
eyes; he was like some man, who serves a woman all his life without asking
whether she be good or bad, wise or foolish; but Taylor cared for nothing
else; he was so much O'Leary's disciple that he would say in conversation,
"We are demoralised, what case for change if we are not?" for O'Leary
admitted no ground for reform outside the moral life, but when he spoke to
the great plea he would make no admission. He spoke to it in the most
obscure places, in little halls in back streets where the white-washed
walls are foul with grease from many heads, before some audience of
medical students or of shop assistants, for he was like a man under a
curse, compelled to hide his genius, and compelled to show in conspicuous
places his ill judgment and his temper.

His distaste for myself, broken by occasional tolerance, in so far as it
was not distaste for an imagination that seemed to him aesthetic rather
than ethical, was be