where he loved most. A Unionist in politics, a
leader-writer on _The Daily Express_, the most Conservative paper in
Ireland, hater of every form of democracy, he had given all his heart to
the smaller Irish landowners, to whom he belonged, and with whom his
childhood had been spent, and for them he wrote his books, and would soon
rage over their failings in certain famous passages that many men would
repeat to themselves like poets' rhymes. All round us people talked or
wrote for victory's sake, and were hated for their victories--but here was
a man whose rage was a swan-song over all that he had held most dear, and
to whom for that very reason every Irish imaginative writer owed a portion
of his soul. In his unfinished _History of Ireland_ he had made the old
Irish heroes, Fion, and Oisin, and Cuchullan, alive again, taking them,
for I think he knew no Gaelic, from the dry pages of O'Curry and his
school, and condensing and arranging, as he thought Homer would have
arranged and condensed. Lady Gregory has told the same tales, but keeping
closer to the Gaelic text, and with greater powers of arrangement and a
more original style, but O'Grady was the first, and we had read him in our
'teens. I think that, had I succeeded, a popular audience could have
changed him little, and that his genius would have stayed, as it had been
shaped by his youth in some provincial society, and that to the end he
would have shown his best in occasional thrusts and parries. But I do
think that if, instead of that one admirable little book _The Bog of
Stars_, we had got all his histories and imaginative works into the hands
of our young men, he might have brought the imagination of Ireland nearer
the Image and the honeycomb.

Lionel Johnson was to be our critic, and above all our theologian, for he
had been converted to Catholicism, and his orthdoxy, too learned to
question, had accepted all that we did, and most of our plans. Historic
Catholicism, with all its counsels and its dogmas, stirred his passion
like the beauty of a mistress, and the unlearned parish priests who
thought good literature or good criticism dangerous were in his eyes "all
heretics." He belonged to a family that had called itself Irish some
generations back, and its recent English generations but enabled him to
see as one single sacred tradition Irish nationality and Catholic
religion. How should he fail to know the Holy Land? Had he not been in
Egypt? He had joined our L