n turned out in tall hats and
frock-coats. We of Miss Somerville's generation depend on our
imagination, not on memory, to reconstruct the scene. The grandfather in
question died before the great famine of 1847, which shook and in many
places uprooted the old order without yet bringing in the new. His son,
Martin Ross's father, had the famine to cope with and survived it; but
of the second convulsion from which emerged the Ireland of to-day he saw
only the beginning, for he died in 1873, when the organised peasant
uprising was at most a menace. But his wife knew both periods--the bad
times of the late 'forties and the bad times of the early eighties. The
true link with the past for the writers of _Irish Memories_ is through
the female line. This is a book of mothers and daughters rather than of
fathers and sons.

Martin Ross's mother went back easily in memory to the society which had
known the Irish Parliament, had made or accepted the Union, and which,
after the Union, exercised chieftainship in Ireland. She was the
daughter of Chief Justice Bushe, one of Grattan's rivals in oratory,
who, like Grattan, had opposed the Union with all the resources of his
eloquence. Against his name in the private Castle list of voters for the
crucial division had been written in despair one word: "Incorruptible."
He was the common ancestor whose blood made the bond of kinship between
Miss Somerville and Martin Ross, and both these staunch Unionist ladies
are passionately proud of the part which their grandfather played in
resisting the Union; just as you will find the staunchest Ulster
Covenanters exulting in the fact that they had a forbear "out" with the
United Irishmen at Antrim or Ballynahinch in 1798. No wonder Englishmen
find Ireland puzzling; but Scots understand, for their own records
abound in examples of the same paradoxes of historic sentiment.

_Yesterday in Ireland_, I think, for my present purpose comes to define
itself as the period between the famine of 1847 and the famine of
1879--between the downfall of O'Connell and Parnell's coming to power.
We who were born in the 'sixties grew up in the close of it, and perhaps
recognise now more clearly than when they were with us the characters of
our kindred who were a part of it as mature human beings. "The men and
women, but more specially the women of my mother's family and
generation, are a lost pattern, a vanished type." I could say the same
as Miss Somerville. There was