he said, "I have been thinking. If you and ... (naming
another aversion,) were born in a small Italian principality in the Middle
Ages, he would have friends at court and you would be in exile with a
price on your head." He went off without another word, and the next time
we met he was no less offensive than before. He, imprisoned in himself,
and not the always unperturbed O'Leary, comes before me as the tragic
figure of my youth. The same passion for all moral and physical splendour
that drew him to O'Leary would make him beg leave to wear, for some few
days, a friend's ring or pin, and gave him a heart that every pretty woman
set on fire. I doubt if he was happy in his loves; for those his powerful
intellect had fascinated were, I believe, repelled by his coarse red hair,
his gaunt ungainly body, his stiff movements as of a Dutch doll, his badly
rolled, shabby umbrella. And yet with women, as with O'Leary, he was
gentle, deferential, almost diffident.

A Young Ireland Society met in the lecture hall of a workman's club in
York Street with O'Leary for president, and there four or five university
students and myself and occasionally Taylor spoke on Irish history or
literature. When Taylor spoke, it was a great event, and his delivery in
the course of a speech or lecture of some political verse by Thomas Davis
gave me a conviction of how great might be the effect of verse spoken by
a man almost rhythm-drunk at some moment of intensity, the apex of long
mounting thought. Verses that seemed when one saw them upon the page flat
and empty caught from that voice, whose beauty was half in its harsh
strangeness, nobility and style. My father had always read verse with an
equal intensity and a greater subtlety, but this art was public and his
private, and it is Taylor's voice that rings in my ears and awakens my
longing when I have heard some player speak lines, "so naturally," as a
famous player said to me, "that nobody can find out that it is verse at
all." I made a good many speeches, more I believe as a training for
self-possession than from desire of speech.

Once our debates roused a passion that came to the newspapers and the
streets. There was an excitable man who had fought for the Pope against
the Italian patriots and who always rode a white horse in our Nationalist
processions. He got on badly with O'Leary who had told him that
"attempting to oppress others was a poor preparation for liberating your
own country." O'Le