fact, going to Dublin to consult some books in the College Library.
Marion and I had been brought up short in our labours on my history
for want of some quotations from the diary of a seventeenth-century
divine, and even if I had been willing to buy the book I should have
had to wait months while a second-hand bookseller advertised for it.

Trinity College, when I entered the quadrangle next day, seemed
singularly deserted. The long vacation had begun a week before.
Fellows, professors and students had fled from the scene of their
labours. Halfway across the square, however, I met McNeice. He seemed
quite glad to see me and invited me to luncheon in his rooms. I
accepted the invitation and was fed on cold ham, stale bread and
bottled stout.

Thackeray once hinted that fellows of Trinity College gave their
guests beer to drink. Many hard words have been said of him ever since
by members of Dublin University. I have no wish to have hard things
said about me; so I explain myself carefully. McNeice's luncheon was
an eccentricity. It is not on cold ham solely, it is not on stale
bread ever, that guests in the Common Room are fed. If, like Prince
Hal, they remember amid their feasting "that good creature, small
beer," they do not drink it without being offered nobler beverages.
When the University, in recognition of my labours on the Life of St.
Patrick, made me a doctor of both kinds of law, I fared sumptuously in
the dining hall and afterwards sipped port rich with the glory of suns
which shone many many years ago on the banks of the upper Douro.

After luncheon, while I was still heavy with the spume of the stout,
McNeice asked me if I had seen the new paper which was being published
to express, I imagine also to exacerbate, the opinions of the Ulster
Unionists. He produced a copy as he spoke. It was called _The
Loyalist_.

"We wanted something with a bite in it," he said. "We're dead sick of
the pap the daily papers give us in their leading articles."

Pap is, I think, a soft innocuous food, slightly sugary in flavour,
suitable for infants. I should never have dreamed of describing the
articles in _The Belfast Newsletter_ as pap. An infant nourished on
them would either suffer badly from the form of indigestion called
flatulence or would grow up to be an exceedingly ferocious man. I
felt, however, that if McNeice had anything to do with the editing of
_The Loyalist_ its articles would be of such a kind that those of