Falstaff's reckoning at Dame Quickly's becomes a moderate score in
comparison with this!

I spent half an hour again in the muniment-room at Kilkenny Castle,
where, in the Expense-Book of the second Duke of Ormond, I found a
supper _menu_ worthy of record, as illustrating what people meant by
"keeping open house" in the great families of the time of Queen
Anne.[Note L.]

Taking a train early in the afternoon, I came on here in time to dine
last night with Mr. Rolleston of Delgany, an uncompromising Protestant
"Home Ruler"--as Protestant and as uncompromising as John Mitchel--whose
recent pamphlet on "Boycotting" has deservedly attracted so much
attention on both sides of the Irish Sea.

I was first led into a correspondence with Mr. Rolleston by a remarkable
article of his published in the _Dublin University Review_ for February
1886, on "The Archbishop in Politics." In that article, Mr. Rolleston,
while avowing himself to be robust enough to digest without much
difficulty the _ex officio_ franchise conferred upon the Catholic clergy
by Mr. Parnell to secure the acceptance of his candidates at
Parliamentary conventions, made a very firm and fearless protest against
the attempt of the Archbishops of Dublin and Cashel to "boycott"
Catholic criticism of the National League and its methods, by declaring
such criticism to be "a public insult" offered, not to the Archbishops
of Cashel and Dublin personally, or as political supporters of the
National League, but to the Archbishops as dignitaries of the Catholic
Church, and to their Archiepiscopal office. The "boycotting," by
clerical machinery, of independent lay opinion in civil matters, is to
the body politic of a Catholic country what the germ of cancer is to the
physical body. And though Mr. Rolleston, in this article, avowed himself
to be a hearty supporter of the "political programme of the National
League," and went so far even as to maintain that the social boycotting,
"which makes the League technically an illegal conspiracy against law
and individual liberty," might be "in many cases justified by the
magnitude of the legalised crime against which it was directed," it was
obvious to me that he could not long remain blind to the true drift of
things in an organisation condemned, by the conditions it has created
for itself, to deal with the thinkers of Ireland as it deals with the
tenants of Ireland. His recent pamphlet on "Boycotting" proves that I
was right. What