To sum up then, John Redmond and his brother came of a long strain of Catholic gentry who were linked by continuous historic association of over seven centuries to a certain district in South Leinster, and who retained leadership among their own people.  The tradition of military service was strong, too, in this family.  Their father’s cousin, son to the original John Edward Redmond, was a professional soldier; and their mother was the daughter of General Hoey.  They were brought up in an old-fashioned country house, Ballytrent, on the Wexford coast, and the habits of outdoor country life and sport which furnished the chief pleasure of their lives were formed in boyhood.  Their upbringing differed from that of boys in thousands of similar country houses throughout Ireland only in one circumstance; they were Catholics, and even so lately as in their boyhood Catholic land-owners were comparatively few.

John Redmond was four years older than his younger brother, born in 1861.  He got his schooling under the Jesuits at Clongowes in early days, before the system of Government endowment by examination results had given incentive to cramming.  According to his own account he did little work and nobody pressed him to exertion.  But the Jesuits are skilful teachers, and they left a mark on his mind.  It is scarcely chance that the two speakers of all I have heard who had the best delivery were pupils of theirs—­Redmond and Sir William Butler.  They taught him to write, they taught him to speak and to declaim, they encouraged his natural love of literature.  His taste was formed in those days and it was curiously old-fashioned.  His diction in a prepared oration might have come from the days of Grattan:  and he maintained the old-fashioned habit of quotation.  No poetry written later than Byron, Moore and Shelley made much appeal to him, save the Irish political ballads.  But scarcely any English speaker quoted Shakespeare in public so often or so aptly as this Irishman.

From Clongowes he went to Trinity College, Dublin, where he matriculated in October 1874 at the age of seventeen.  His academic studies seem to have been half-hearted.  At the end of a year his name was taken off the College books by his father, but was replaced.  At the close of his second year of study, in July 1876, it was removed again and for good.

But apart from what he learnt at school, his real education was an apprenticeship; he was trained in the House of Commons for the work of Parliament.  He was a boy of fifteen, of an age to be keenly interested, when the representation of Wexford passed from his great-uncle to his father.  Probably the reason why he was removed from Trinity College was the desire of Mr. William Redmond to have his son with him in London.  Certainly John Redmond was there during the session of 1876, for on the introduction of Mr. Gladstone’s second Home Rule Bill he recalled a finely apposite Shakespearean quotation which he