ween the landlord and the and goading the last into not in his power to satisfy, of the population filled with ir own interests, reckless of lothed, miserably housed, capest possible food in the What can we expect monstrous! But it is not ore in other countries, it ees in a great degree will be remedied again firmness and honesty

wealth of a country cannot well be separated from its moral effects. The two different divisions under which the subject may be considered, unavoidably incroach upon each other. Thus absenteeism is a source of poverty, and from poverty result misery and crime; crime again causing alarm, by a natural reaction reproduces absenteeism.

But though absenteeism be in every point of view an evil, it would be folly and quackery to charge it with being the cause of all, or even of a very considerable portion of the peculiar evils of Ireland. These evils do not spring from one source, nor can they be removed by one remedy. If we must broach a nostrum of some kind, we would say, raise the Irish standard of comfort, an object which poor laws promise fairest to realise. They who blame the Irish for suffering themselves to be so easily made the tools of selfish and unprincipled agitators, should remember their unhappy circumstances, and consider, that though it is easy for people who look at the matter coolly from a distance, to see that the measures proposed by such men can in no degree tend to promote the ends nominally held out by them to their dupes, we might ourselves, in the place of the Irish peasants, be ready enough to grasp such shadows as they do. In Ireland we see not only religious and political dissensions, not only a minute subdivision of land, with a system of mid

dlemen, interposing between the landlord and the cultivator of the soil, and goading the last into madness by exactions not in his power to satisfy, but a large proportion of the population filled with prejudices adverse to their own interests, reckless of human life, miserably clothed, miserably housed, and subsisting on the cheapest possible food in the smallest possible quantity. What can we expect from a state of things so monstrous! But it is not new, it has existed heretofore in other countries, it has been in other instances in a great degree remedied; and it may and will be remedied again by rulers who shall have the firmness and honesty to persevere in attacking what themselves know to be evils, and who will not be persuaded to think those evils, attested as such by the clamours alone of an ignorant and deluded populace.

236

OF THE MEN TO BE LOVED AND THE
MEN TO BE ADMIRED.

Süsses Dichten, laut're Wahrheit
Fesselt mich in Sympathie,
Rein verkörpert Liebes-Klarheit
Im Gewand der Poesie.

Goethe.

Ir is strange how little we know of each other. Men pass through life wearing a conventional mask, often partially, but seldom entirely withdrawn, save through the influence of those occasional emotions witnessed by few spectators, and which would cease to be powerful if they were less rare. Those with whom we are in the constant habit of social intercourse we know but imperfectly; many of our more distinguished contemporaries, with whose sayings and doings we are familiar without personal acquaintance, we often mistake most grossly; truly then may we say, in reverting to the worthies of antiquity,

"Whose deeds have died, however nobly done,"

* Spenser.

and left posterity no autographic memorial of those who wrought them;

"The world knows nothing of its greatest men."

If they who embark in the troubled seas of war and politics obtain more than their due admiration from contemporaries, the neglect of succeeding generations adjusts the scale. They have left nothing themselves by which we can judge them, we know them only at second hand by what others have said of them, which usually amounts to no more than a skeleton of the real living man, to be fleshed by each inquirer after the fashion he lists. Our interest, therefore, in the characters of ancient warriors and statesmen, unless it should happen that their names are party-watchwords in our own times, is, like our knowledge of them, faint. We can see none but the literary dead in the light of personal acquaintances, and of these, only the comparatively few whose peculiar idiosyncracy is stamped upon

their works.

A man cannot express his opinions on many subjects without disclosing much of his moral character, for the will often bids the understanding find reasons for what it desires to think. Hence it is that we know men best by their books, which should be

* Philip van Artevelde.