praise or blame, but that the twigs of the holy nest
are not easily set afire. The verses may make his mistress famous as
Helen or give a victory to his cause, not because he has been either's
servant, but because men delight to honour and to remember all that have
served contemplation. It had been easier to fight, to die even, for
Charles's house with Marvel's poem in the memory, but there is no zeal
of service that had not been an impurity in the pure soil where the
marvel grew. Timon of Athens contemplates his own end, and orders his
tomb by the beachy margent of the flood, and Cleopatra sets the asp to
her bosom, and their words move us because their sorrow is not their own
at tomb or asp, but for all men's fate. That shaping joy has kept the
sorrow pure, as it had kept it were the emotion love or hate, for the
nobleness of the Arts is in the mingling of contraries, the extremity of
sorrow, the extremity of joy, perfection of personality, the perfection
of its surrender, overflowing turbulent energy, and marmorean stillness;
and its red rose opens at the meeting of the two beams of the cross, and
at the trysting-place of mortal and immortal, time and eternity. No new
man has ever plucked that rose, or found that trysting-place, for he
could but come to the understanding of himself, to the mastery of
unlocking words after long frequenting of the great Masters, hardly
without ancestral memory of the like. Even knowledge is not enough, for
the 'recklessness' Castiglione thought necessary in good manners is
necessary in this likewise, and if a man has it not he will be gloomy,
and had better to his marketing again.

IV

When I saw John O'Leary first, every young catholic man who had
intellectual ambition fed his imagination with the poetry of Young
Ireland; and the verses of even the least known of its poets were
expounded with a devout ardour at Young Ireland Societies and the like,
and their birthdays celebrated. The School of writers I belonged to
tried to found itself on much of the subject-matter of this poetry, and,
what was almost more in our thoughts, to begin a more imaginative
tradition in Irish literature, by a criticism at once remorseless and
enthusiastic. It was our criticism, I think, that set Clarence Mangan at
the head of the Young Ireland poets in the place of Davis, and put Sir
Samuel Ferguson, who had died with but little fame as a poet, next in
the succession. Our attacks, mine especially, on ve