d every morsel
of this intelligence with an avidity which could not have been surpassed
if the United States had been engaged in a war with Great Britain. Among
these correspondents perhaps the most brilliant was the late Harold
Frederic. Not many months before he died I received a letter from him,
in which he said that, although we were unknown to each other, he
thought, from some public utterances of mine, that we must have many
views in common. He had often intended to get an introduction to me, and
now suggested that we should 'waive things and meet.' We met and spent
an evening together, which left some deep impressions on my mind. He
told me that the Irish Question possessed for him a fascination for
which he could give no rational explanation. He had absolutely no tie of
blood or material interest with Ireland, and his friendship for it had
brought him the only quarrels in which he had ever been engaged.

What chiefly interested me in Harold Frederic's philosophy of the Irish
Question was that he had arrived at a diagnosis of the Irish mind not
substantially different from my own. Since that evening I have come
across a passage in one of his novels, which clothes in delightful
language his view of the chaotic psychology of the Celt:

There, in Ireland, you get a strange mixture of elementary early
peoples, walled off from the outer world by the four seas, and
free to work out their own racial amalgam on their own lines. They
brought with them at the outset a great inheritance of Eastern
mysticism. Others lost it, but the Irish, all alone on their
island, kept it alive and brooded on it, and rooted their whole
spiritual side in it. Their religion is full of it; their blood is
full of it.... The Ireland of two thousand years ago is incarnated
in her. They are the merriest people and the saddest, the most
turbulent and the most docile, the most talented and the most
unproductive, the most practical and the most visionary, the most
devout and the most pagan. These impossible contradictions war
ceaselessly in their blood.[30]

In our conversation what struck me most was the influence which politics
had exercised even on his philosophic mind, notwithstanding a low
estimate of our political leaders. In one of a series of three notable
articles upon the Irish Question, which appeared anonymously in the
_Fortnightly Review_[31] in the winter of 1893-4, and