n, though he came of a good family, was obviously not a
gentleman in the common sense of the term. Mr. Parnell was a gentleman
in that sense. He had the bearing, the manners, the natural easy
dignity of a man of birth who has always moved in good society. He
rarely permitted any one to take liberties with him, even the innocent
liberties of familiar intercourse. This made his departures from what
may be called the inner and higher standard of gentlemanly conduct all
the more remarkable.

He has been accused of a want of physical courage. He did no doubt
after the Phoenix Park murders ask the authorities in England for
police protection, being, not unnaturally, in fear for his life; and
he habitually carried firearms. He was at times in danger, and there
was every reason why he should be prepared to defend himself. An
anecdote was told of another member of the House of Commons whose
initials were the same as his own, and who, taking what he supposed to
be his own overcoat from the peg on which it hung in the cloakroom of
the House, was startled when he put his hand into the pocket to feel
in it the cold iron of a pistol. Moral courage he showed in a high
degree during his whole public career, facing his antagonists with an
unshaken front, even when they were most numerous and bitter. Though
he intensely disliked imprisonment, the terms on which he came out of
Kilmainham Gaol left no discredit upon him. He behaved with perfect
dignity under the attacks of the press in 1887, and in the face of the
use made of letters attributed to him which turned out to have been
forged by Richard Pigott--letters which the bulk of the English upper
classes had greedily swallowed. With this courage and dignity there
was, however, little trace of magnanimity. He seldom said a generous
word, or showed himself responsive to such a word spoken by another.
Accustomed to conceal his feelings, except in his most excited
moments, he rarely revealed, but he certainly cherished, vindictive
sentiments. He never forgave either Mr. W. E. Forster or Mr. Gladstone
for having imprisoned him in 1881;[36] and though he stood in some
awe of the latter, whom he considered the only really formidable
antagonist he had ever had to confront, he bore a grudge which
smouldered under the reconciliation of 1886 and leapt into flame in
the manifesto of November 1890.

The union in Mr. Parnell of intense passion with strenuous self-control
struck all who watched him