Released from power, the old man employed the most wonderful resources of ...

Released from power, the old man employed the most wonderful resources of voice, presence, experience, fame, of scholarly and religious accomplishment, ever given to an English statesman, to keep Ireland before the eyes of a people already stirring away from Liberalism towards an Imperialism or a collectivism of which he understood nothing.

But in those same years, the West Britons were gathering material for a new statement of Irish nationality, a new assault on the impermeable arrogance of the conqueror, and imparting to English thought not a little of their own resentment, impatience, and disaffection. To a foreigner, the age through which we ourselves have been living is the age of Galsworthy, Wells, and Shaw; before them of Wilde.

Something, doubtless, beside literary

enjoyment guides his taste, and in his malicious preference for what is most critical and most subversive, we catch an echo of that passionate jealousy of England which for a generation was the most widely diffused emotion in Europe, a generation when it seemed at times not wholly out of reckoning that a second League of Cambria might be formed for the spoliation of a greater Venice. But two Irishmen in a list of four? It is to be thought of.

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