he said to me the other day in a letter about the
pamphlet may be said as truly of the article. It was "a shaft sunk into
the obscure depths of Irish opinion, to bring to light and turn to
service whatever there may be in those depths of sound and healthy;" and
one of my special objects in this present visit to Ireland was to get a
personal touch of the intellectual movement which is throwing such
thinkers as Mr. Rolleston to the front.

We were five at table, Mr. Rolleston's other guests being Mr. John
O'Leary, whose name is held in honour for his courage and honesty by all
who know anything of the story of Ireland in our times, and who was sent
a quarter of a century ago as a Fenian patriot--not into seclusion with
sherry and bitters, at Kilmainham, like Mr. Gladstone's "suspects" of
1881--but like Michael Davitt, into the stern reality of penal
servitude; Dr. Sigerson, Dean of the Faculty of Science of the Boyal
University, and an authority upon the complicated question of Irish Land
Tenures; and Mr. John F. Taylor, a leading barrister of Dublin, an ally
on the Land Question of Mr. Davitt, and an outspoken Repealer of the
Union of 1800.

I have long wished to meet Mr. O'Leary, who sent me, through a
correspondent of mine, two years ago, one of the most thoughtful and
well-considered papers I have ever read on the possibilities and
impossibilities of Home Rule for Ireland; and it was a great pleasure to
find in the man the elevation of tone, the breadth of view, and the
refined philosophic perception of the strong and weak points in the
Irish case, which had charmed me in. the paper. Now that "Conservative"
Englishmen have come to treat the main points of Chartism almost as
commonplaces in politics, it is surely time for them to recognise the
honesty and integrity of the spirit which revolted in the Ireland of
1848 against the then seemingly hopeless condition of that country. Of
that spirit Mr. O'Leary is a living, earnest, and most interesting
incarnation. He strikes one at once as a much younger man in all that
makes the youth of the intellect and the emotions than any Nationalist
M.P. of half his years whom I have ever met. No Irishman living has
dealt stronger or more open blows than he against the English dominion
in Ireland. Born in Tipperary, where he inherited a small property in
houses, he was sent to Trinity College in Dublin, and while a student
there was drawn into the "Young Ireland" party mainly by th