“Hated all things base,
    And held his country’s honour high.”

And the spirit of all the poems it contains is the spirit of ’48, or of that earlier Ireland of Robert Emmet, celebrated in some charming verses by “Rose Kavanagh” on “St. Michan’s Churchyard,” where the

“sunbeam went and came
Above the stone which waits the name
His land must write with freedom’s flame.”

It interests an American to find among these poems and ballads a striking threnody called “The Exile’s Return,” signed with the name of “Patrick Henry”; and it is noteworthy, for more reasons than one, that the volume winds up with a “Marching Song of the Gaelic Athletes,” signed “An Chraoibhin Aoibbinn.”  These Athletes are numbered now, I am assured, not by thousands, but by myriads, and their organisation covers all parts of Ireland.  If the spirit of ’48 and of ’98 is really moving among them, I should say they are likely to be at least as troublesome in the end to the “uncrowned king” as to the crowned Queen of Ireland.

As for the literary merit of these Poems and Ballads of Young Ireland, it strikes one key with their political quality.  One exquisite ballad of “The Stolen Child,” by W. B. Yeats, might have been sung in the moonlight on a sylvan lake by the spirit of Heinrich Heine.

I spent an hour or two this morning most agreeably in the libraries of the Law Courts and of Trinity College:  the latter one of the stateliest most academic “halls of peace” I have ever seen; and this afternoon I called upon Dr. Sigerson, a most patriotic Irishman, of obviously Danish blood, who has his own ideas as to Clontarf and Brian Boru; and who gave me very kindly a copy of his valuable report on that Irish Crisis of 1879-80, out of which Michael Davitt so skilfully developed the agrarian movement whereof “Parnellism” down to this time has been the not very well adjusted instrument.  The report was drawn up after a thorough inspection by Dr. Sigerson and his associate, Dr. Kenny, visiting physicians to the North Dublin Union, of some of the most distressed districts of Mayo, Sligo, and Galway; and a more interesting, intelligent, and impressive picture of the worst phases of the social conditions of Ireland ten years ago is not to be found.  I have just been reading it over carefully in conjunction with my memoranda made from the Emigration and Seed Potato Fund Reports, which Mr. Tuke gave me some time ago, and it strongly reinforces the evidence imbedded in those reports, which goes to show that agitation for political objects in Ireland has perhaps done as much as all other causes put together to depress the condition of the poor in Ireland, by driving and keeping capital out of the country.  The worst districts visited in 1879 by Dr. Sigerson and Dr. Kenny do not appear to have been so completely cut off from civilisation as was the region about Gweedore before the purchase of his property there by Lord