modic
efforts? The era on which the famine fell was intellectually a singularly
fruitful one. A group of young men, among the most generous and
disinterested in our annals, were busy digging up the buried relics of our
history, to enlighten the present by a knowledge of the past, setting up
on their pedestals anew the overthrown statues of Irish worthies,
assailing wrongs which under long impunity had become unquestioned and
even venerable, and warming as with strong wine the heart of the people,
by songs of valour and hope; and happily not standing isolated in their
pious work, but encouraged and sustained by just such an army of students
and sympathisers as I see here to-day. The famine swept away their
labours; and their passionate attempts to arrest and redress the
destruction which the famine inflicted, delivered them over to
imprisonment and penal exile. Their incomplete work, produced amid the
tumult and conflict of a great political struggle, has been a treasure to
two generations of Irishmen; and it supplied the impulse of work which
rivalled their own. The publisher of Petrie's "Round Towers," and John
O'Donovan's translation of "The Four Masters," assured me that he could
not have ventured to issue books so costly, but for the enthusiasm kindled
in the public mind by the young nationalists, and Butt and Lefanu, who at
that time were strict Conservatives, confessed that while writing "The Gap
of Barnesmore" and "The Cock and Anchor," they constantly thought how
welcome such works would be to Young Irelanders. The patriot's library has
not been burthensome in latter times. But Moore's melodies, Griffin's and
Banim's novels, the histories of MacGeoghegan and Curry, and the writings
of these young men have been a constant cordial to the sorely-tried spirit
of our people. Since their day, individual writers have done useful work
from the unquenchable desire God has planted in men's heart to serve their
own race, but there has been no organised attempt to raise the mind of the
country to higher and more generous ideals of life and duty, or to quicken
its interest in things which it behoves us to know. No nation can with
impunity neglect the mind of the growing generation, the generation which
after a little time will guide its counsels and guard its interests. The
thought which has long haunted my reveries, and which I desire to speak
out to-day, is this--that the young men of your generation might and
should take up