Though a staunch Unionist, Sir Michael is no blind admirer of things as they are, nor even a thick-and-thin partisan of English rule in Ireland.  “If you will have the Irish difficulty in a nutshell,” he is reported to have said to a prosy British politician, “here it is:  It is simply a very dull people trying to govern a very bright people.”

He has quick and wide intellectual sympathies, or, as he put it to a lawyer who was kindly enlightening him about some matters of scientific notoriety, “I don’t live in a cupboard myself.”  His own terse summing up of the Irish difficulty could hardly be better illustrated than by the current story of the discomfiture of an English Treasury official, who came into his official chambers to complain of the expenditure for fuel in the Court over which he presides.  The Lord Chief-Justice looked at him quietly while he set forth his errand, and then, ringing a bell on his table, said to the servant who responded:  “Tell Mary the man has come about the coals.”

At Sir Michael’s I had some conversation also with Mr. Justice Murphy, who won a great reputation in connection with those murders in the Phoenix Park, which went near to breaking the heart and hope of poor Father Burke, and with Lord and Lady Ashbourne, whom I had not seen since I met them some years ago under the hospitable roof of Lord Houghton.  Lord Ashbourne was then Mr. Gibson, Q.C.  He is now the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, and the author of the Land Purchase Act of 1885, which many well-informed and sensible men regard as the Magna Charta of peace in Ireland, while others of equal authority assure me that by reversing the principle of the Bright clauses in the Act of 1871 it has encouraged the tenants to expect an eventual concession of the land-ownership to them on merely nominal terms.

Naturally enough, he is carped at and reviled almost as much by his political friends as by his political foes.  In the time of Sir Michael Hicks Beach I remember hearing Lord Ashbourne denounced most bitterly by a leading Tory light as “a Home Ruler in disguise, who had bedevilled the Irish Question by undertaking to placate the country if it could be left to be managed by him and by Lord Carnarvon.”

The disguise appears to me quite impenetrable, and after my talk with him, I remembered a characteristic remark about him made to me by Lord Houghton after he had gone away:  “A very clever man with a very clever wife.  He ought to be on our side, but he has everything the Tories lack, so they have stolen him, and will make much of him, and keep him.  But one of these days he will do them some great service, and then they’ll never forgive him!”