ks of Livy." I do not suggest
that you should publish these books or any of them, but surely they are
finger-posts pointing to an unexplored territory. While I am speaking of
the resources for a popular library, which we have in hand, I may say that
one-third of the writings of Thomas Davis or Clarence Mangan has not been
collected in volumes. Davis's most remarkable achievement as an historian,
"The Patriot Parliament" he calls it--not the Parliament of Grattan, but
the Parliament of Tyrconnell, was prepared for publication by his own
hand, and it has remained without a publisher for two generations. Nothing
of the miscellaneous writings of John Blake Dillon, John O'Hagan, Thomas
Meagher, or Charles Kickham, have been gathered into books. And how much
of the wealth of our ancient Gaelic literature still lies buried in
untranslated MSS., or in the transactions of learned societies.

A perfectly honest and respectable blockhead asked me recently, "What is
the use of books for men working for their daily bread, or for young
fellows whose first business in life is to make some way in the world?"
From the highest class in the nation to the humblest, good books are the
salt of life. They make us wiser, manlier, more honest, and what is less
than any of these, more prosperous. It is not the least of their merits
that good books make manly men and patriotic citizens. Robert Burns
declared that reading the "Life of William Wallace" poured a tide of
Scottish sentiment into his veins, which would boil till the flood-gates
of life shut in eternal rest. A man who has done and suffered much for
Ireland during the last forty years, has often avowed that he was made a
patriot by reading the Poems of Thomas Davis; and how many other Irishmen
have confessed the same debt to him and his associates? The great
Dominican, Father Burke, and Professor Tyndall of Belfast, the fierce
Unionist, are equally warm in their acknowledgment of the effect produced
upon them in their youth by the writings of the Young Irelanders. The late
Judge O'Hagan, one of the most upright and gifted of Irishmen, used to
declare that the evening when he first read the address of John Blake
Dillon to the College Historical Society, he was a Whig, but the next day,
and ever after, he was a Nationalist. To how many of us is that Address
still inaccessible? Would it not be a beneficent work to republish it?
Surely there is no Irishman of any political persuasion who would