His study-story of some Irish estate, granted by Queen Elizabeth to an English nobleman, showed how language might determine history.  He noted there, a force at work that tended to cloud the mind and influence the imagination, in considering such affairs.  The estate was called ’a princely property,’ and the new holder was the ’aristocratic owner of the soil.’  He had ‘extensive lands in England;’ perhaps he had ’the most beautiful demesne’ and ‘the finest mansion’ in that country.  If the Elizabethan landlord, planted in Ireland, drove along the high road, he was described as the ‘noble occupant of the carriage.’  Did he spend, on the improvement of his property, a little of the wealth won by the toil, privation, and suffering of others, why, he was credited with ’unbounded liberality.’

So, down the centuries, the effect being that sympathy was involuntarily drawn to all this rank, wealth, and ease.  Similarly, by an unconscious process of mind, there disappeared from the public eye the gaunt faces, the bent bodies, of those who gave to rank the means of wealth and ease.  Contemplating the plight, to which the people of Ireland had fallen in his soldiering days, Sir George Grey exclaimed, ’What intellect and power were lost to the nation!  What must have been the yearnings and agonies undergone by many noble minds, feeling capable of great things, perhaps even of rescuing their country from the misery in which it was sunk!’

Remove such people to a new atmosphere in the Colonies, where their natural attainments could have just scope, and behold a fairy change!  They would yield leaders of citizenship, men capable of shaping nations and legislatures, the laws of which the Old World would be glad to copy.  Sir George could place the fruit of history, what had come about, in the remote basket of his hopes.

From it there dated a reminiscence of Sir Hussey Vivian, his Commander-in-Chief in Dublin.  Sir Hussey, who, with his dragoons, covered Moore’s retreat on Corunna, knew Sir George’s father in the Spanish Peninsula.  Viewing the troublous Irish times, he had ordered that military officers should wear their uniform, whether on duty or not.  Handsome, genial, popular with everybody, a born soldier; this was Sir George’s appreciation of the man with whom he had the following adventure: 

’Accompanied by a brother officer I was strolling along in Dublin, neither of us in uniform, notwithstanding Sir Hussey’s order.  We were walking arm in arm when, on turning a corner, we espied him and his staff.  What was to be done?  We did not relish the notion of being caught in mufti, and looked round for a door of escape.  There was none, except flight, and we took to our heels.

’The same night we each had a message from Sir Hussey, begging us to call upon him at eleven o’clock next morning.  We knew what that meant.  Sir Hussey had been too quick for our flight.  A trifle shamefaced, we duly presented ourselves at his quarters, and he talked to us for being abroad in plain clothes.