e charm
of literary ornament. All was dry, direct, and practical, without so
much as a graceful phrase or a choice epithet. Sometimes, when
addressing a great public meeting, he would seek to rouse the audience
by vehement language; but though there might be a glow of suppressed
passion, there were no flashes of imaginative light. Yet he never gave
the impression of an uneducated man. His language, though it lacked
distinction, was clear and grammatical. His taste was correct. It was
merely that he did not care for any of those things which men of
ability comparable to his usually do care for. His only interests,
outside politics, lay in mechanics and engineering and in the
development of the material resources of his country. He took pains to
manage his estate well, and was specially anxious to make something
out of his stone quarries, and to learn what could be done in the way
of finding and working minerals.

Those who observed that he was almost always occupied in examining and
attacking the measures or the conduct of those who governed Ireland
were apt to think his talent a purely critical one. They were
mistaken. Critical, indeed, it was, in a remarkable degree; keen,
penetrating, stringently dissective of the arguments of an opponent,
ingenious in taking advantage of a false step in administration or of
an admission imprudently made in debate. But it had also a positive
and constructive quality. From time to time he would drop his negative
attitude and sketch out plans of legislation which were always
consistent and weighty, though not made attractive by any touch of
imagination. They were the schemes not so much of a statesman as of an
able man of business, who saw the facts, especially the financial
facts, in a sharp, cold light, and they seldom went beyond what the
facts could be made to prove. And his ideas struck one as being not
only forcible but independent, the fruit of his own musings. Although
he freely used the help of others in collecting facts or opinions, he
did not seem to be borrowing the ideas, but rather to have looked at
things for himself, and seen them as they actually were, in their true
perspective, not (like many Irishmen) through the mists of sentiment
or party feeling. The impression made by one of his more elaborate
speeches might be compared to that which one receives from a grey
sunless day with an east wind, a day in which everything shows clear,
but also hard and cold.

To call h