n who, if they had been allowed
fair play, would have made the sorrows of Ireland the memory of an
evil dream; but he had come too late, the spirit of the Cromwellians
had died out of the land, and was not to be revived by a single
enthusiast." He was murdered, and Froude could point his favourite
moral that the woes of the sister country would be healed by the
appearance of another Cromwell, which he had to admit was
improbable. The Irish hero, Morty Sullivan, has been in France, and
is ready to fight for the Pretender. He did no good. Few Irishmen,
in Froude's opinion, ever did any good. But in The Two Chiefs of
Dunboy, if anywhere, Froude shows his sympathy with the softness of
the Irish character, and Morty's meditations on his return from
France are expressed as only Froude could express them. Morty was
walking with his sister by the estuary of the Kenmare River opposite
Derrynane, afterwards famous as the residence of Daniel O'Connell,
"For how many ages had the bay and the rocks and the mountains
looked exactly the same as they were looking then? How many
generations had played their part on the same stage, eager and
impassioned as if it had been erected only for them! The half-naked
fishermen of forgotten centuries who had earned a scanty living
there; the monks from the Skelligs who had come in on high days in
their coracles to say mass for them, baptize the children, or bury
the dead; the Celtic chief, with saffron shirt and battle-axe,
driven from his richer lands by Norman or Saxon invaders, and
keeping hold in this remote spot on his ragged independence; the
Scandinavian pirates, the overflow of the Northern Fiords, looking
for new soil where they could take root. These had all played their
brief parts there and were gone, and as many more would follow in
the cycles of the years that were to come, yet the scene itself was
unchanged and would not change. The same soft had fed those that
were departed, and would feed those that were to be. The same
landscape had affected their imaginations with its beauty or awed
them with its splendours; and each alike had yielded to the same
delusion that the valley was theirs and was inseparably connected
with themselves and their fortunes. Morty's career had been a stormy
one .... He had gone out into the world, and had battled and
struggled in the holy cause, yet the cause was not advanced, and it
was all nothing. He was about to leave the old place, probably for
ever.