thrice again,
When at the table men shall drink with men.

That was Kettle's mood to the last. This was the mood that made him
regard with such horror the execution of Pearse and Connolly, and the
other leaders of the Dublin insurrection. He regarded these men as
having all but destroyed his dream of an Ireland enjoying the freedom
of Europe. But he did not believe that any English Government possessed
the right to be merciless in Ireland. The murder of Sheehy-Skeffington,
who was his brother-in-law, cast another shadow over his imagination
from which he never recovered. Only a week before he died he wrote to me
from France: "The Skeffington case oppresses me with horror." When I saw
him in the previous July, he talked like a man whose heart Easter Week
and its terrible retributions had broken. But there must have been
exaltation in those days just before his death, as one gathers from the
last, or all but the last, of his letters home:

We are moving up to-night into the battle of the Somme. The
bombardment, destruction, and bloodshed are beyond all imagination,
nor did I ever think that the valour of simple men could be quite
as beautiful as that of my Dublin Fusiliers. I have had two chances
of leaving them--one on sick leave and one to take a staff job. I
have chosen to stay with my comrades.

There at the end you have the grand gesture. There you have the "good
lines" that Kettle had always desired.

XXIV

MR. J.C. SQUIRE

It would not have been easy a few years ago to foresee the achievement
of Mr. Squire as a poet. He laboured under the disadvantage of being
also a wit. It used to be said of Ibsen that a Pegasus had once been
shot under him, and one was alarmed lest the reverse of this was about
to happen to Mr. Squire, and lest a writer who began in the gaiety of
the comic spirit should end soberly astride Pegasus. When, in _Tricks of
the Trade_, he announced that he was going to write no more parodies,
one had a depressed feeling that he was about to give up to poetry what
was meant for mankind. Yet, on reading Mr. Squire's collected poems in
_Poems: First Series_, it is difficult not to admit that it was to write
serious verse even more than parody and political epigram that he was
born.

He has arranged the poems in the book in the order of their composition,
so that we can follow the development of his powers and see him, as it
were, learning to fly. To read