ir heart's disease, as though it were
but repeating the story to themselves. Terrible and harrowing as are the
tales which reach the physician's ears, the stories revealed to his were
more terrible and harrowing still. They came to him with narratives of
reckless waste and ruin; with histories of debt that dated a century
back; with worse, far worse,--with tales of forgery and fraud. Crimes
for which the law would have exacted its last expiation were whispered
to him in that dreary confessional, his private office, and the
evidences of guilt placed in his hands that he might read and reflect
over them. And as the doctor moves through life with the sad knowledge
of all the secret suffering around him,--how little that "flush"
indicates of health, how faintly beats the heart that seems to swell
with happiness,--so did this man walk a world that was a mere hospital
ward of moral rottenness. Why should the priest and the physician be the
only men to trade upon the infirmities of human nature? Why should they
be the sole depositaries of those mysteries by which men's actions can
be swayed and moulded? By what temptations are men so assailable as
those that touch their material fortunes, and why not make this moral
country an especial study? Such were his theory and his practice.

There is often a remarkable fitness--may we call it a "pre-established
harmony"?--between men and the circumstances of their age, and this has
led to the opinion that it is by the events themselves the agents are
developed; we incline to think differently, as the appearance of both
together is rather in obedience to some over-ruling edict of Providence
which has alike provided the work and the workmen. It would be a shallow
reading of history to imagine Cromwell the child of the Revolution, or
Napoleon as the accident of the battle of the sections.

Davenport Dunn sprang into eminence when, by the action of the
Encumbered Estates Court, a great change was operated in the condition
of Ireland. To grasp at once the immense consequences of a tremendous
social revolution--to foresee even some of the results of this sweeping
confiscation--required no common knowledge of the country, and no small
insight into its habits. The old feudalism that had linked the fate of
a starving people with the fortunes of a ruined gentry was to be
extinguished at once, and a great experiment tried. Was Ireland to be
more governable in prosperity than in adversity? This was