ere reprinted in the edition of Davis's
Prose Writings published by Walter Scott in 1890, are here omitted--the
former because it seemed possible to fill with more valuable and mature
work the space it would have taken, and the latter because the cause
which it was written to support has in our day been practically won;
Udalism will inevitably be the universal type of land-tenure in
Ireland, and the real problem which we have before us is not how to win
but how to make use of the institution, a matter with which Davis, in
this essay, does not concern himself.

The life of Thomas Davis has been written by his friend and colleague,
Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, and an excellent abridgment of it appears as a
volume in the "New Irish Library." In the latter easily available form
it may be hoped that there are few Irishmen who have not made
themselves acquainted with it. It is not, therefore, necessary to deal
with it here in much detail. Davis was born in Mallow on October 14th,
1814. His father, who came of a family originally Welsh, but long
settled in Buckinghamshire, had been a surgeon in the Royal Artillery.
His mother, Mary Atkins, came of a Cromwellian family settled in the
County Cork. It does not seem an altogether hopeful kind of ancestry
for an Irish Nationalist, and his family were, as a matter of fact,
altogether of the other way of thinking. But the fact that his
great-grandmother, on the maternal side, was a daughter of The
O'Sullivan Beare may have had a counteracting influence, if not through
the physical channel of heredity, at least through the poet's
imagination. As a child, Davis was delicate in health, sensitive,
dreamy, awkward, and passed for a dunce. It was not until he had
entered Trinity College that the passion for study possessed him. This
passion had manifestly been kindled, in the first instance, by the
flame of patriotism, but how and when he first came to break loose from
the traditional politics of his family we have no means of knowing,
unless a gleam of light is thrown on the matter by a saying of his from
a speech at Conciliation Hall:--"I was brought up in a mixed seminary,[2]
where I learned to know, and knowing to love, my countrymen."

At the University he sought no academic distinctions, but read
omnivorously. History, philosophy, economics, and ethics were the
subjects into which he flung himself with ardour, and which, in after
days, he was continually seeking to turn to the uses of h