s of whom
we had heard much but had seen little, an elderly fighting man, lately
imprisoned for beating a wine-merchant. A young member of the London
society, afterwards librarian to the National University, D. J. O'Donohue,
who had published a dictionary of the Irish poets, containing, I think,
two thousand names, had come to Dublin and settled there in a fit of
patriotism. He had been born in London, and spoke the most Cockney dialect
imaginable, and had picked up--probably from London critics--a dislike for
the poetry of Thomas Moore. The tombstone maker invited him to tea, and he
arrived with a bundle of books, which he laid beside him upon the table.
During tea he began expounding that dislike of his; his host was silent,
but he went on, for he was an obstinate little man. Presently the
tombstone-maker rose, and having said solemnly, "I have never permitted
that great poet to be slandered in my presence," seized his guest by the
back of the collar, and flung him out into the street, and after that
flung out the books one after another. Meanwhile the guest--as he himself
told the tale--stood in the middle of the street repeating, "Nice way to
treat a man in your own 'ouse."

V

I shared a lodging full of old books and magazines, covered with dirt and
dust, with the head of the Fenian Brotherhood, John O'Leary. "In this
country," he had said to me, "a man must have upon his side the Church or
the Fenians, and you will never have the Church." He had been converted to
nationality by the poems of Davis, and he wished for some analogous
movement to that of Davis, but he had known men of letters, had been the
friend of Whistler, and knew the faults of the old literature. We had made
him the President of our Society, and without him I could do nothing, for
his long imprisonment and longer exile, his magnificent appearance, and,
above all, the fact that he alone had personality, a point of view not
made for the crowd's sake, but for self-expression, made him magnetic to
my generation. He and I had long been friends, he had stayed with us at
Bedford Park, and my father had painted his portrait, but if I had not
shared his lodging he would have opposed me. He was an old man, and my
point of view was not that of his youth, and it often took me half the day
to make him understand--so suspicious he was of all innovation--some
simple thing that he would presently support with ardour. He had grown up
in a European movement when