as I constantly do, sleeping in stone cells! It would be a good action if you, who would be listened to, would ask Mr. Gladstone, who has told us his opinion of the treatment proper for State prisoners, to allow them books and pen and ink, and a few yards of matting for their cells. They would not be less secure, but they would be rescued from torture.
"When old Palmerston died I could not help regretting that you had not remained in Parliament. Mr. Gladstone might surely be made see, if you were within reach of his ear, that the very greatest work which remains for a British statesman to attempt is the pacification of Ireland. Peel had the glory of carrying Catholic Freedom and Free Trade, but there is a greater work behind. I doubt if it can be attempted with advantage while a man so conceited and so fearful of English opinion as Lord Russell remains; but this Government will not last long I fancy, and after the Tories there will no doubt be a Gladstone Government. A poor old conceited body, beyond seventy, who thinks he carried the Great Reform Bill and created the No Popery riots of 1850 is not the man for such an undertaking."
My dear friend "the Maynooth Professor," who had taken much trouble to make friends for me at Rome, urged two works on me to be undertaken in the winter holidays. I had mentioned to him that Murray's "Handbook to Rome" was substantially borrowed from an original and most laborious volume by an Irish priest, in which the inscriptions on monuments and facts of every sort which look so well-informed in Murray, had been found. He urged me to review the Handbook in the Dublin Review, doing justice to the original pioneer. "Catholic Theologians," he said, "constantly borrow from each other, without acknowledgment, whole sentences and paragraphs, word for word. Donovan, a Catholic author takes from another Catholic author, and gives what he takes in a Catholic spirit. This is all in 'a family way,' between brother and brother. It is quite another and widely different thing, when an English Protestant plunders a Catholic writer, and smears the goods thus stolen with his own japan, and sells them as wares of genuine Protestant manufacture. Then you could give such a vivid, flashing 'flame picture' of all you saw and felt in the
