ence of
virtue by those that have but little, which is the pomp and gallantry of
journalism and its right to govern the world.

As I stood there watching, knowing well that I saw the dissolution of a
school of patriotism that held sway over my youth, Synge came and stood
beside me, and said, 'A young doctor has just told me that he can hardly
keep himself from jumping on to a seat, and pointing out in that howling
mob those whom he is treating for venereal disease.'

II

Thomas Davis, whose life had the moral simplicity which can give to
actions the lasting influence that style alone can give to words, had
understood that a country which has no national institutions must show
its young men images for the affections, although they be but diagrams
of what it should be or may be. He and his school imagined the Soldier,
the Orator, the Patriot, the Poet, the Chieftain, and above all the
Peasant; and these, as celebrated in essay and songs and stories,
possessed so many virtues that no matter how England, who, as Mitchell
said, 'had the ear of the world,' might slander us, Ireland, even though
she could not come at the world's other ear, might go her way unabashed.
But ideas and images which have to be understood and loved by large
numbers of people, must appeal to no rich personal experience, no
patience of study, no delicacy of sense; and if at rare moments some
_Memory of the Dead_ can take its strength from one; at all other
moments manner and matter will be rhetorical, conventional, sentimental;
and language, because it is carried beyond life perpetually, will be as
wasted as the thought, with unmeaning pedantries and silences, and a
dread of all that has salt and savour. After a while, in a land that
has given itself to agitation over-much, abstract thoughts are raised up
between men's minds and Nature, who never does the same thing twice, or
makes one man like another, till minds, whose patriotism is perhaps
great enough to carry them to the scaffold, cry down natural impulse
with the morbid persistence of minds unsettled by some fixed idea. They
are preoccupied with the nation's future, with heroes, poets, soldiers,
painters, armies, fleets, but only as these things are understood by a
child in a national school, while a secret feeling that what is so
unreal needs continual defence makes them bitter and restless. They are
like some state which has only paper money, and seeks by punishments to
make it buy whateve