sbury, would have found himself in one of the
casemates of Fort Lafayette within twenty-four hours. Our Republican
rulers acted upon the maxim laid down by Mr. Tilden's friend, Montgomery
Blair,[9] that "to await the results of slow judicial prosecution is to
allow crime to be consummated, with the expectation of subsequent
punishment, instead of preventing its accomplishment by prompt and
direct interference." Perhaps Americans take their Government more
seriously than Englishmen do. Certainly we stand by it more sternly in
bad weather. Even so good a Constitutionalist as Professor Parsons at
Harvard, I remember, when a student asked him if he would not suspend
the _Habeas Corpus_ in the case of a man caught hauling down the
American flag, promptly replied, "I would not suspend the _Habeas
Corpus_; I would suspend the _Corpus_."
We found no "hansoms" at the Dublin Station, only "outside cars," and
cabs much neater than the London four-wheelers. One of these brought us
at a good pace to Maple's Hotel in Kildare Street, a large,
old-fashioned but clean and comfortable house. My windows look down upon
a stately edifice of stone erecting on Kildare Street for all sorts of
educational and "exhibitional" purposes, with the help of an Imperial
grant, I am told, and to be called the Leinster Hall. The style is
decidedly composite, with colonnades and loggie and domes and porticos,
and recalls the ancient Roman buildings depicted in that fresco of a
belated slave-girl knocking at her mistress's door which with its
companion pieces is fast fading away upon the walls of the "House of
Livia" on the Palatine.
At one end of this street is the fashionable and hospitable Kildare
Street Club; at the other the Shelburne Hotel, known to all Americans.
This seems to have been "furbished-up" since I last saw it. There, for
the last time as it proved, I saw and had speech of my friend of many
years, the prince of all preachers in our time, Father Burke of Tallaght
and of San Clemente.
I had telegraphed to him from London that I should halt in Dublin for a
day, on my way to America, to see him. He came betimes, to find me
almost as badly-off as St. Lawrence upon his gridiron. The surgeon whom
the hotel people had hastily summoned to relieve me from a sudden attack
of that endemic Irish ecstasy, the lumbago, had applied what he called
the "heroic treatment" on my telling him that I had no time to be ill,
but must spend that day with Fat
|