s, and a special room is devoted to
modern Irish art. I wish the Corcoran Gallery (founded, too, by an
Irishman!) were half as worthy of Washington, or the Metropolitan Museum
one-tenth part as worthy of New York!

The National Gallery in London has loaned some pictures to Dublin, and
Mr. Doyle is getting together, from private owners, a most interesting
gallery of portraits of men and women famous in connection with Irish
history. The beautiful Gunnings of the last century, the not less
beautiful and much more brilliant Sheridans of our own, Burke, Grattan,
Tom Moore, Wellington, Curran, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, O'Connell, Peg
Woffington, Canning, and Castlereagh, Dean Swift, Laurence Sterne are
all here--wits and statesmen, soldiers and belles, rebels and royalists,
orators and poets. Two things strike one in this gallery of the "glories
of Ireland." The great majority of the faces are of the Anglo-Irish or
Scoto-Irish type; and the collection owes its existence to an
accomplished public officer, who bears an Irish name, who is a devout
Catholic, and who is also an outspoken opponent of the Home Rule
contention as now carried on.

The gallery is open on liberal conditions to students. Mr. Doyle tells
me that a young sister of Mr. Parnell was at one time an assiduous
student here. He used to stop and chat with her about her work as he
passed through the gallery. One day he met her coming out. "Mr. Doyle,"
she said, "are you a Home Ruler?" "Certainly not," he replied
good-naturedly. Whereupon, with an air of melancholy resignation, the
young lady said, "Then we can never more be friends!" and therewith
flitted forth.

A small room contains some admirable bits of the work of Richard Doyle,
among other things a weird and grotesque, but charming cartoon of an
elfish procession passing through a quaint and picturesque mediaeval
city. It is a _conte fantastique_ in colour--a marvel of affluent fancy
and masterly skill.

I found here this morning letters calling me over to Paris for a short
time, and one also from Mr. Davitt, in London, explaining that my note
to him through the National League had never reached him, and that he
had gone to London on his woollen business. I have written asking him to
meet me to-morrow in London, and I shall cross over to-night.

LONDON, _Wednesday, Feb. 15th._--Mr. Davitt spent an hour with me
to-day, and we had a most interesting conversation. His mind is just now
full of the woollen