anywhere, Froude shows his sympathy with the softness of the Irish character, and Morty’s meditations on his return from France are expressed as only Froude could express them.  Morty was walking with his sister by the estuary of the Kenmare River opposite Derrynane, afterwards famous as the residence of Daniel O’Connell, “For how many ages had the bay and the rocks and the mountains looked exactly the same as they were looking then?  How many generations had played their part on the same stage, eager and impassioned as if it had been erected only for them!  The half-naked fishermen of forgotten centuries who had earned a scanty living there; the monks from the Skelligs who had come in on high days in their coracles to say mass for them, baptize the children, or bury the dead; the Celtic chief, with saffron shirt and battle-axe, driven from his richer lands by Norman or Saxon invaders, and keeping hold in this remote spot on his ragged independence; the Scandinavian pirates, the overflow of the Northern Fiords, looking for new soil where they could take root.  These had all played their brief parts there and were gone, and as many more would follow in the cycles of the years that were to come, yet the scene itself was unchanged and would not change.  The same soft had fed those that were departed, and would feed those that were to be.  The same landscape had affected their imaginations with its beauty or awed them with its splendours; and each alike had yielded to the same delusion that the valley was theirs and was inseparably connected with themselves and their fortunes.  Morty’s career had been a stormy one ....  He had gone out into the world, and had battled and struggled in the holy cause, yet the cause was not advanced, and it was all nothing.  He was about to leave the old place, probably for ever.  Yet there it was, tranquil, calm, indifferent whether he came or went.  What was he?  What was any one?  To what purpose the ineffectual strivings of short-lived humanity?  Man’s life was but the shadow of a dream, and his work was but the heaping of sand which the next tide would level flat again.”

Wordsworth’s “pathetic fallacy” that the moods of nature correspond with the moods of man has seldom found such eloquent illustration as in Morty’s vain imaginings.  Morty himself was shot dead by English soldiers in revenge for the murder of Goring.  The story is a dismal and tragic one.  But the best qualities of the Irish race are there, depicted with true sympathy, and perhaps this volume may be held to confirm Carlyle’s opinion, expressed in a letter to Miss Davenport Bromley, that even The English in Ireland was “more disgraceful to the English Government by far than to the Irish savageries.”  Froude, indeed, never forgot the kindness of the Kerry peasants who nursed him through the small-pox.  He would have done anything for the Irish, except allow them to govern themselves.

In 1890 Froude contributed to the series of The Queen’s Prime Ministers, edited by Mr. Stuart Reid, a biographical study of Lord Beaconsfield.  He wrote to Mr. Reid on the subject: