ged by my words, and gradually
led him to speak of those evils for whose alleviation he looked
to France. To my surprise, however, he descanted less on political
grievances than those which affect the well-being of the country
socially. It was not the severity of a Government, but the absence of
encouragement to industry,--the neglect of the poor,--which afflicted
him. England was no longer the tyrant; the landlord had taken her place.
Still, with the pertinacity of ignorance, he visited all the wrongs on
that land from which originally his first misfortunes came, and with
perverse ingenuity would endeavor to trace out every hardship he
suffered as arising from the ill-will and hatred the Saxon bore him.

It was easy to perceive that the arguments he used were not of his own
devising; they had been supplied by others, in whose opinion he had
confidence; and though valueless and weak in reality, to him they were
all-convincing and unanswerable,--not the less, perhaps, that they
offered that value to self-love which comes from attributing any
evils we endure to causes outside and independent of ourselves. These,
confronted with extravagant hopes of what would ensue should national
independence be established, formed his code; and however refuted on
each point, a certain conviction, too deeply laid to be disturbed by any
opposing force, remained; and in his "Well, well, God knows best!
and maybe we'll have better luck yet," you could perceive that he was
inaccessible to any appeal except from the quarter which ministered to
his discontent and disaffection.

One thing was clear to me from all he said, that if the spirit of open
resistance no longer existed towards England, it was replaced by as
determined and as rancorous hatred,--a brooding, ill-omened dislike had
succeeded, to the full as hostile, and far less easily subdued. How it
would end,--whether in the long-lingering fear which wastes the energies
and saps the strength of a people, or in the conflict of a civil war,
the prospect was equally ruinous.

Sadly pondering on these things, I parted with my humble host, and set
out towards the capital. If my conversation with the Irishman had taught
me somewhat of the state of feeling then current in Ireland, it also
conveyed another and very different lesson; it enabled me to take some
account of the change years had effected in my own sentiments. As a
boy, high-flown, vague, and unsettled ideas of national liberty and