top of us, till the gulf yawns big and black
under our very eyes, that we fully realize what it means or what it may
come to mean. The old state of things, we then begin to say to
ourselves, was really very inconvenient, very trying to all our tempers
and patience, but at least we know the worst of it. Of the untravelled
future we know nothing. It fronts us, with hands folded, smiling
blankly. It may be a great deal better than we expect, but, on the other
hand, it may be worse, and in ways, too, which as yet we hardly foresee.
Whatever else Home Rule may, would, could, or should be, one thing
friends and foes alike may agree to admit, and that is that it will mark
an entirely new departure--a departure so new that no illustration drawn
from the last century, or from any other historical period, is of much
avail in enabling us to picture it to ourselves. It will be no
resumption, no mere continuation of anything that has gone before, but a
perfectly fresh beginning. A beginning, it may be asked, of what?

LIX.

CONCLUSION.

"Concluded not completed," is the verdict of Carlyle upon one of his
earlier studies, and "concluded not completed," conscience is certainly
apt to mutter at the close of so necessarily inadequate a summary as
this. Much of this inadequacy, it may fairly be confessed, is
individual, yet a certain amount is also inherent in the very nature of
the task itself. In no respect does this inadequacy press with a more
penitential weight than in the case of those heroes whose names spring
up at intervals along our pages, but which are hardly named before the
grim necessities of the case force us onwards, and the hero and his
doings are left behind.

Irish heroes, for one reason or another, have come off, it must be
owned, but poorly before the bar of history. Either their deeds having
been told by those in whose eyes they found a meagre kindness, or else
by others who, with the best intentions possible, have so inflated the
hero's bulk, so pared away his merely human frailties, that little
reality remains, and his bare name is as much as even a well-informed
reader pretends to be acquainted with. Comparing them with what are
certainly their nearest parallels--the heroes and semi-heroes of Scotch
history--the contrast strikes one in an instant, yet there is no reason
in the nature of things that this should be. Putting aside those whose
names have got somewhat obscured by the mists of the past, and pu