y nominal terms.

Naturally enough, he is carped at and reviled almost as much by his
political friends as by his political foes. In the time of Sir Michael
Hicks Beach I remember hearing Lord Ashbourne denounced most bitterly by
a leading Tory light as "a Home Ruler in disguise, who had bedevilled
the Irish Question by undertaking to placate the country if it could be
left to be managed by him and by Lord Carnarvon."

The disguise appears to me quite impenetrable, and after my talk with
him, I remembered a characteristic remark about him made to me by Lord
Houghton after he had gone away: "A very clever man with a very clever
wife. He ought to be on our side, but he has everything the Tories lack,
so they have stolen him, and will make much of him, and keep him. But
one of these days he will do them some great service, and then they'll
never forgive him!"

Lord Ashbourne went off early to look up some fine old wooden
mantelpieces and wainscotings in the "slums" of Dublin. A brisk trade it
seems has for some time been driven in such relics of the departed
splendour of the Irish capital. In the last century, when Dublin was
further from London than London now is from New York, the Irish
landlords were more fond of living in Dublin than a good many of the
Irish Nationalists I know now are. In this way the Iron Duke came to be
born in Dublin, where his father and mother had a handsome town house,
whereas when they went up to London they used to lodge, according to old
Lady Cork, "over a pastry-cook's in Oxford Street." In those days there
must have been a good many fine solidly built and well decorated
mansions in Dublin, of a type not unlike that of the ample rather
stately and periwigged houses, all British brick without, and all Santo
Domingo mahogany within, which, in my schoolboy days, used to give such
a dignified old-world air to Third and Fourth Streets in Philadelphia.
It is among such of these as are still standing, and have come to vile
uses, that the foragers from London now find their harvest.

From the Chief-Justice's I went with Lord Ernest Hamilton to a meeting
of the Irish Unionists. Admission was by tickets, and the meeting
evidently "meant business." I suppose Presbyterian Ulster was largely
represented: but Mr. Smith Barry of Fota Island, near Cork, one of the
kindest and fairest, as well as one of the most determined and resolute,
of the southern Irish landlords, was there, and the most interesting