ncour, there is not one sentence that has any meaning when
separated from its place in argument or narrative, not one distinguished
because of its thought or music. One imagined his youth in some little
gaunt Irish town, where no building or custom is revered for its
antiquity; and there speaking a language where no word, even in solitude,
is ever spoken slowly and carefully because of emotional implication; and
of his manhood of practical politics, of the dirty piece of orange-peel in
the corner of the stairs as one climbs up to some newspaper office; of
public meetings where it would be treacherous amid so much geniality to
speak, or even to think of anything that might cause a moment's
misunderstanding in one's own party. No argument of mine was intelligible
to him, and I would have been powerless, but that fifty years ago he had
made an enemy, and though that enemy was long dead, his school remained.
He had attacked, why or with what result I do not remember, the only Young
Ireland politician who had music and personality, though rancorous and
devil-possessed. At some public meeting of ours, where he spoke amid great
applause, in smooth, Gladstonian periods, of his proposed Irish publishing
firm, one heard faint hostile murmurs, and at last a voice cried,
"Remember Newry," and a voice answered, "There is a grave there!" and a
part of the audience sang, "Here's to John Mitchell that is gone, boys,
gone; Here's to the friends that are gone." The meeting over, a group of
us, indignant that the meeting we had called for his welcome should have
contained those malcontents, gathered about him to apologize. He had
written a pamphlet, he explained: he would give us copies. We would see
that he was in the right, how badly Mitchell had behaved. But in Ireland
personality, if it be but harsh and hard, has lovers, and some of us, I
think, may have gone home muttering, "How dare he be in the right if
Mitchell is in the wrong?"

IX

He wanted "to complete the Young Ireland movement"--to do all that had
been left undone because of the Famine, or the death of Davis, or his own
emigration; and all the younger men were upon my side in resisting that.
They might not want the books I wanted, but they did want books written by
their own generation, and we began to struggle with him over the control
of the company. Taylor became very angry, and I can understand what I
looked like in his eyes, when I remember Edwin Ellis's seriously-int