n
inwardness not towards egoism, for that Ishmael's distrust of
individualism, would always prevent, but towards a vague Quietism that
enwrapped him more and more. His son, deeply as he engrossed him,
rather increased this trend than otherwise, and Boase, casting about for
other influences, had irresistibly thought of Flynn.

Daniel Flynn was a living mass of contradictions. An Irishman and a
disciple of the O'Connell tradition, he was yet--though the word had not
then been coined--an Imperialist, for his Canadian sympathies were
strong, and he knew that not yet could the Colonies be entirely cut
loose from the Mother Country. A Liberal, he had been an ardent
supporter of the Dominion scheme evolved under the Tory Government of
Derby. He revered the memory of Durham, that large-ideaed,
generous-hearted, spectacular nobleman whose crime had been to hold by
the spirit rather than by the letter, and whom Dan declared to be the
father not only of Canada, but of the modern Colonial system. Though he
held the Crimean War to be an error of policy and the Chinese War of '57
to be an abomination, he never joined with those of Palmerston's
detractors who accused him of being too French in his sympathies. He
inveighed against all wars in the abstract, yet raged at the loyalty of
O'Connell, which, by stopping short at the use of rebellious force, had
alienated his adherents; and he himself had borne arms for Garibaldi. He
had been among the most passionate critics of the manner in which the
trial of the Manchester Fenians had been conducted and at the sentence
pronounced against them, but his Imperialist and O'Connellised self had
deprecated the action of the Fenians in the first place. He was a
Catholic by blood and an agnostic by temperament; the former made him
abhor blasphemy, and the latter definite boundaries. He was a follower
of Russell, that aristocrat of reform, and yet voted against his Reform
Bill, as many Liberals did, because it was half-hearted. He was an
Irish-Canadian and sat for a manufacturing town in the Midlands.

Daniel Flynn was a man whose brain was too finely balanced not to see
fairly, but whose sympathies were so passionately partisan they were for
ever swaying action to one side or other of the true point of equity. On
this evening the Parson found him in fine fettle for a talk, and if
necessary for a fight. He was sitting in the parlour with Vassie, but
his whole soul was with a letter he had had from