THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN.  Yes, that, as you call it so flippantly.  Are you aware, madam, that at that immortal moment the English race had lost intellectual credit to such an extent that they habitually spoke of one another as fatheads?  Yet England is now a sacred grove to which statesmen from all over the earth come to consult English sages who speak with the experience of two and a half centuries of life.  The land that once exported cotton shirts and hardware now exports nothing but wisdom.  You see before you, madam, a man utterly weary of the week-end riverside hotels of the Euphrates, the minstrels and pierrots on the sands of the Persian Gulf, the toboggans and funiculars of the Hindoo Koosh.  Can you wonder that I turn, with a hungry heart, to the mystery and beauty of these haunted islands, thronged with spectres from a magic past, made holy by the footsteps of the wise men of the West.  Consider this island on which we stand, the last foothold of man on this side of the Atlantic:  this Ireland, described by the earliest bards as an emerald gem set in a silver sea!  Can I, a scion of the illustrious British race, ever forget that when the Empire transferred its seat to the East, and said to the turbulent Irish race which it had oppressed but never conquered, ’At last we leave you to yourselves; and much good may it do you,’ the Irish as one man uttered the historic shout ’No:  we’ll be damned if you do,’ and emigrated to the countries where there was still a Nationalist question, to India, Persia, and Corea, to Morocco, Tunis, and Tripoli.  In these countries they were ever foremost in the struggle for national independence; and the world rang continually with the story of their sufferings and wrongs.  And what poem can do justice to the end, when it came at last?  Hardly two hundred years had elapsed when the claims of nationality were so universally conceded that there was no longer a single country on the face of the earth with a national grievance or a national movement.  Think of the position of the Irish, who had lost all their political faculties by disuse except that of nationalist agitation, and who owed their position as the most interesting race on earth solely to their sufferings!  The very countries they had helped to set free boycotted them as intolerable bores.  The communities which had once idolized them as the incarnation of all that is adorable in the warm heart and witty brain, fled from them as from a pestilence.  To regain their lost prestige, the Irish claimed the city of Jerusalem, on the ground that they were the lost tribes of Israel; but on their approach the Jews abandoned the city and redistributed themselves throughout Europe.  It was then that these devoted Irishmen, not one of whom had ever seen Ireland, were counselled by an English Archbishop, the father of the oracles, to go back to their own country.  This had never once occurred to them, because there was nothing to prevent them and nobody to forbid them.  They jumped at