sliked anything
one said or did, he spoke all his thought, but in a little one heard his
justice match her charity. "Never has there been a cause so bad," he would
say, "that it has not been defended by good men for good reasons." Nor
would he overvalue any man because they shared opinions; and when he lent
me the poems of Davis and the Young Irelanders, of whom I had known
nothing, he did not, although the poems of Davis had made him a patriot,
claim that they were very good poetry.

His room was full of books, always second-hand copies that had often been
ugly and badly printed when new and had not grown to my unhistoric mind
more pleasing from the dirt of some old Dublin book-shop. Great numbers
were Irish, and for the first time I began to read histories and verses
that a Catholic Irishman knows from boyhood. He seemed to consider
politics almost wholly as a moral discipline, and seldom said of any
proposed course of action that it was practical or otherwise. When he
spoke to me of his prison life he spoke of all with seeming freedom, but
presently one noticed that he never spoke of hardship and if one asked him
why, he would say, "I was in the hands of my enemies, why should I
complain?" I have heard since that the governor of his jail found out that
he had endured some unnecessary discomfort for months and had asked why he
did not speak of it. "I did not come here to complain," was the answer. He
had the moral genius that moves all young people and moves them the more
if they are repelled by those who have strict opinions and yet have lived
commonplace lives. I had begun, as would any other of my training, to say
violent and paradoxical things to shock provincial sobriety, and Dowden's
ironical calm had come to seem but a professional pose. But here was
something as spontaneous as the life of an artist. Sometimes he would say
things that would have sounded well in some heroic Elizabethan play. It
became my delight to rouse him to these outbursts for I was the poet in
the presence of his theme. Once when I was defending an Irish politician
who had made a great outcry because he was treated as a common felon, by
showing that he did it for the cause's sake, he said, "there are things
that a man must not do even to save a nation." He would speak a sentence
like that in ignorance of its passionate value, and would forget it the
moment after.

I met at his house friends of later life, Katharine Tynan who still lived
up