bstractions were like the fixed ideas of some
hysterical woman, a part of the mind turned into stone, and all the rest a
seething and burning; and Unionist Ireland had re-acted from that seething
and burning to a cynical indifference, and from those fixed ideas to
whatever might bring the most easy and obvious success.

I remember Taylor at some public debate, stiff of body and tense of voice;
and the contrasting figure of Fitzgibbon, the Lord Justice of Appeal of
the moment and his calm, flowing sentences, satisfactory to hear and
impossible to remember. Taylor speaks of a little nation of antiquity,
which he does not name, "set between the great Empire of Persia and the
great Empire of Rome." Into the mouths of those great Empires he puts the
arguments of Fitzgibbon, and such as he, "Join with our greatness! What
in comparison to that is your little, beggarly nationality?" And then I
recall the excitement, the shiver of the nerves, as his voice rose to an
ecstatic cry, "Out of that nation came the salvation of the world." I
remember, too, and grow angry, as it were yesterday, a letter from that
Lord Justice of Appeal, who had changed his politics for advancement's
sake, recommending a correspondent to avoid us, because we dissuaded
people from the study of "Shakespeare and Kingsley."

Edward Dowden, my father's old friend, with his dark romantic face, the
one man of letters Dublin Unionism possessed, was withering in that barren
soil. Towards the end of his life he confessed to a near friend that he
would have wished before all things to have been the lover of many women;
and some careless lecture, upon the youthful Goethe, had in early life
drawn down upon him the displeasure of the Protestant Archbishop. And yet
he turned Shakespeare into a British Benthamite, flattered Shelley but to
hide his own growing lack of sympathy, abandoned for like reason that
study of Goethe that should have been his life-work, and at last cared but
for Wordsworth, the one great poet who, after brief blossom, was cut and
sawn into planks of obvious utility. I called upon him from time to time
out of gratitude for old encouragements, and because, among the Dublin
houses open to me, his alone was pleasant to the eye, with its many books
and its air of scholarship. But when O'Grady had declared, rancorous for
once but under substantial provocation, that he had "a bad head and a
worse heart," I found my welcome troubled and called no more.