ar more important in its practical results than any movement I
could have made, no matter what my luck, but, being neither quarrelsome
nor vain, he will not be angry if I say--for the sake of those who come
after us--that I mourn for the "greatest folk-loreist who ever lived,"
and for the great poet who died in his youth. The Harps and Pepperpots got
him and the Harps and Pepperpots kept him till he wrote in our common
English--"It must be either English or Irish," said some patriotic editor,
Young Ireland practice in his head--that needs such sifting that he who
would write it vigorously must write it like a learned language, and took
for his model the newspaper upon his breakfast table, and became for no
base reason beloved by multitudes who should never have heard his name
till their schoolmasters showed it upon his tomb. That very incapacity for
criticism made him the cajoler of crowds, and of individual men and women;
"He should not be in the world at all," said one admiring elderly woman,
"or doing the world's work"; and for certain years young Irish women were
to display his pseudonym, "Craoibhin Aoibhin," in gilt letters upon their
hat bands.

"Dear Craoibhin Aoibhin,......impart to us,
We'll keep the secret, a new trick to please;
Is there a bridle for this Proteus
That turns and changes like his draughty seas,
Or is there none, most popular of men,
But, when they mock us, that we mock again?"

VII

Standish O'Grady, upon the other hand, was at once all passion and all
judgment. And yet those who knew him better than I assured me he could
find quarrel in a straw; and I did know that he had quarrelled a few years
back with Jack Nettleship. Nettleship's account had been, "My mother
cannot endure the God of the Old Testament, but likes Jesus Christ;
whereas I like the God of the Old Testament, and cannot endure Jesus
Christ; and we have got into the way of quarrelling about it at lunch; and
once, when O'Grady lunched with us, he said it was the most disgraceful
spectacle he had ever seen, and walked out." Indeed, I wanted him among my
writers, because of his quarrels, for, having much passion and little
rancour, the more he quarrelled, the nobler, the more patched with
metaphor, the more musical his style became, and if he were in his turn
attacked, he knew a trick of speech that made us murmur, "We do it wrong,
being so majestical, to offer it the show of violence." Sometimes he
quarrelled most