of the Land Act, as well as the Church Act last year, most wonderful—wonderful especially in the absolute penury of Irish public men and the impotence of Irish public opinion? Great questions seem to have a momentum in themselves—they gather and roll like a snowball, independent of external force. True, no doubt, that the Manchester and Clerkenwell exploits of the Fenians had much to say to the result, but above all the strange and rare providence that for once in half a thousand years put an honest and earnest man at the head of affairs. That the effects will be most beneficent there is no doubt. May you be here to share in and promote them!
"Long before you receive this you will have been overwhelmed by the news of the French disasters. I cannot express to you how they are felt here. It is like the anguish of our own flesh. But is not this strange, Duffy? The old monarchy of France has been written down by Carlyle and a host of others as the very type of a degrading and corrupting régime. Yet a generation which came to manhood under that régime not only manifested, as regards the bulk of the nation, a magnificent national valour and energy, but produced at once a crop of first-rate captains in the flower of their years. And now, after a century of regenerated institutions, there seems neither adequate spirit nor a man to guide it, I am tempted to agree with an old countess in one of Balzac's novels, who protested that the two things most blasphemed against within her knowledge were God and the eighteenth century. Returning to domestica facta I know how deeply you must have been gratified by O'H.'s elevation to the Chancellorship and the Peerage. I read your letter to him on the former occasion. He is very much awake to the necessity of reforming and, as far as possible, reconstructing the local administration of Ireland; but in such matters he must proceed very gradually. Of his own personal authority he can do little."
Cashel Hoey, before this lecture could reach him, described to me an article he had written in the Dublin Review, urging on Irish Nationalists that the policy which Gladstone and Bright were pursuing ought to be welcome to them, as I
