olitics drew O'Grady away from the work he began so greatly. I have
said to myself he might have given us an Oscar, a Diarmuid or a Caolte,
an equal comrade to Cuculain, but he could not, being lit up by the
spirit of his hero, he merely the bard and not the fighter, and no man
in Ireland intervened in the affairs of his country with a superior
nobility of aim. He was the last champion of the Irish aristocracy, and
still more the voice of conscience for them, and he spoke to them of
their duty to the nation as one might imagine some fearless prophet
speaking to a council of degenerate princes. When the aristocracy failed
Ireland he bade them farewell, and wrote the epitaph of their class in
words whose scorn we almost forget because of their sounding melody
and beauty. He turned his mind to the problems of democracy and more
especially of those workers who are trapped in the city, and he pointed
out for them the way of escape and how they might renew life in the
green fields close to Earth, their ancient mother and nurse. He used
too exalted a language for those to whom he spoke to understand, and it
might seem that all these vehement appeals had failed but that we know
that what is fine never really fails. When a man is in advance of his
age, a generation, unborn when he speaks, is born in due time and finds
in him its inspiration. O'Grady may have failed in his appeal to the
aristocracy of his own time but he may yet create an aristocracy of
character and intellect in Ireland. The political and economic writings
will remain to uplift and inspire and to remind us that the man who
wrote the stories of heroes had a bravery of his own and a wisdom of his
own. I owe so much to Standish O'Grady that I would like to leave it
on record that it was he made me conscious and proud of my country, and
recalled to my mind, that might have wandered otherwise over too wide
and vague a field of thought, to think of the earth under my feet and
the children of our common mother. There hangs in the Municipal Gallery
of Dublin the portrait of a man with melancholy eyes, and scrawled on
the canvas is the subject of his bitter brooding: "'The Lost Land."
I hope that O'Grady will find before he goes back to Tir na noge that
Ireland has found again through him what seemed lost for ever, the law
of its own being, and its memories which go back to the beginning of the
world.

THE DRAMATIC TREATMENT OF LEGEND

"The Red Branch oug