When I rushed up to tell him of my discovery he was in breeches and riding-boots, presenting in my drawing-room an incongruous spectacle of sport on a background of impressionist pictures.

You don't mean to tell me that you brought me all the way from Mayo to argue with you about Catholicism and Protestantism, leaving important work?

What work?

Clearing the stone park.



Do let me tell you; it won't take more than ten minutes for me to state my case. And this is a matter that interests me much more than the stone park. The question must be threshed out.

He protested much, beseeching me to believe that he had neither the learning nor the ability to argue with me.

Father Finlay—

That's what Gill said. But the matter is one that can be decided by anybody of ordinary education; even education isn't necessary, for it must be clear to anybody who will face the question without prejudice that the mind petrifies if a circle be drawn round it, and it can hardly be denied that dogma draws a circle round the mind.

The Colonel was very wroth, and his words were that I lived among Protestants, who were inclined to use me as a stalking-horse.

I came to Ireland, as you know, to help literature, and if I see that dogma and literature are incompatible, I must say so.

At that moment the parlourmaid opened the door and announced dinner.

You'll be late for dinner, Maurice.

If I am, you're to blame, and he rushed upstairs; and as we sat down to dinner he begged me, in French, to drop the subject, Teresa being a Catholic.

I suppose you are afraid she might hear something to cause her to lose her faith, I said as she went out with the soup-tureen.

I think we should respect her principles.

The word inflamed me. Superstitions that were rammed into her.

She returned with the roast chicken, and the question had to be dropped until she returned to the kitchen to fetch an apple dumpling; and we did not really settle down to literature or dogma until coffee was brought in and my cigar was alight.

It's a great pity that you always set yourself in opposition to all received ideas. I was full of hope when you wrote saying you were coming to Ireland. I suppose there's no use asking you not to publish. You will always go your own way.

But if I limit myself to an essay entitled Literature or Dogma—you don't object to that?

No, I don't say I object to it; but I'd rather not have the question raised just now.

I see you don't wish to discuss it.



I put forward both propositions. But my main contention is that the Catholic may not speculate; and the greatest literature has come out of speculation on the value of life. Shakespeare—

There is nothing in Shakespeare contrary to Catholic dogma.

You are very prompt.

Moreover, I deny that England had, at that time, gone over entirely to Protestantism. Italian culture had found its way into England; England had discovered her voice, I might say her language. A Renaissance has nothing in common with Puritanism and there is reason for thinking this. The Brownists? And the Colonel, who is a well-read man, gave me an interesting account of these earliest Puritans.

The larger part of the English people may have been Protestant, he continued, in 1590; but England hadn't entirely gone over to Protestantism. Besides, England's faith has nothing to do with Shakespeare. Nor does anybody know who wrote the plays.

My dear friend, you won't allow me to develop my argument. It matters nothing to me whether you prefer the lord or the mummer. The plays were written, I suppose, by an Englishman; that, at least, will not be denied; and my contention is—No, there is no reason why I should contend, for it is sufficiently obvious that only an Agnostic mind could have woven the fabric of the stories and set the characters one against the other. A sectarian soul would not have been satisfied to exhibit merely the passions.

Will you charge me again with interrupting your argument if I say that I know nothing in Shakespeare that a Catholic might not have written?

Well, I think if I were to take down a volume and read it, I could find a hundred verses. I see your answer trembling on your lips, that you don't require a hundred, but two or three. Very well. A Catholic couldn't have written There is nothing serious in mortality, for he believes the very contrary; nor could a Catholic have written A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

What reason have you to suppose that Shakespeare was speaking in his own person? It seems to me that by assuming he was doing so, you impugn his art as a dramatist, which is to give appropriate speeches to each of his characters; the writer must never transpire in a drama.



I cannot see why a Catholic might not have written the phrases you quote. One can only judge these things by one's own conscience, and if I had thought of these verses—

You would have written them? I've always suspected you of being an Agnostic Catholic.

The difference between the Agnostic and the Catholic mind seems to me to be this—we all doubt (to doubt is human), only in the ultimate analysis the Catholic accepts and the Agnostic rejects.

We know that the saints suffered from doubt, but the Agnostic doesn't doubt, though he is often without hope of a survival of his personality. A good case might be made out, metaphysically, if it weren't that most of us are without any earthly personality. Why then a heavenly one? You were once a great admirer of Fitzgerald's Omar Khayyám, and I doubt if you will dare to say to my face that a Catholic could have written the Rubáiyát.

The Colonel was at first inclined to agree with me that there was a great deal that a Catholic could not have written in Fitzgerald's poem; but he soon recovered himself, and began to argue that all that Fitzgerald had done was to contrast ideas, maintaining that the argument was conducted very fairly, and that if the poem were examined it would be difficult to adduce proof from it of the author's Agnosticism.

But we know Fitzgerald was an Agnostic?

You're shifting ground. You started by saying that the poems of Shakespeare and Fitzgerald revealed the Agnosticism of the writers, you now fall back upon contemporary evidence.

I don't think I've shifted my ground at all. If we knew nothing about Fitzgerald's beliefs, there is abundant proof in his writings that he was an Agnostic. You'll have to admit that his opinions on the nothingness of life and the futility of all human effort, whether it strives after pleasure or pain, would read as oddly if introduced into the writings of Augustine and Thomas Aquinas as sympathetic remarks about the Immaculate Conception would read in the world of Mr Swinburne or Professor Huxley. The nothingness of our lives and the length of the sleep out of which we come, and the still greater length of the sleep which will very soon fall upon us, is the spring whence all great poetry flows, and this spring is perforce closed to Catholic writers for ever. Do you know the beautiful stanza in Moschus's Lament for Bion?

Ah me! when the mallows wither in the garden, and the green parsley and the curled tendrils of the anise, on a later day they live again and spring in another year; but we, men, we, the great and mighty, or wise, when once we have died, in the hollow earth we sleep, gone down into silence, a right long and endless and unawakening sleep.

Could these lines have been written by a Catholic?

The Colonel could not see why not.

Because ... but, my dear friend, I won't waste time explaining the obvious. This you'll admit—that no such verses occur in Catholic poems?

As poignant expressions regarding the nothingness of life as any in Moschus, Shakespeare, or Fitzgerald are to be found in the Psalms and Ecclesiastes. Man walketh in a vain shadow and troubleth himself in vain.

The Bible wasn't written by Catholics.

The Colonel had to admit that it wasn't, and after watching and rejoicing in his discomfiture for a while I went on to speak of Shakespeare's contemporaries, declaring them to be robust livers, whose philosophy was to live out their day in love of wine and women, as frequenters of the Mermaid Tavern and of wenches, haters of the Puritan.

You'll not claim Marlowe, I suppose? You'll admit that there was very little Catholic about him except a very Catholic taste for life. You mentioned just now the Brownists; they were overcome, you tell me, for the time being. But Puritanism is an enemy, if it be really one, that I can meet in a friendly spirit. Landor says that Virgil and St Thomas Aquinas could never cordially shake hands; but I dare say I could shake hands with Knox. The Puritan closed the theatres, an act which I won't pretend to sympathise with; but England's dramatic genius had spent itself, and for its intolerance of amusement Puritanism made handsome amends by giving us Milton, and a literature of its own. Of course everything can be argued, and some will argue that Milton's poem was written in spite of Puritan influence; but this I do think, that if ever a religious movement may be said to have brought a literature along with it, Puritanism is that one. As much as any man that ever lived, Milton's whole life was spent in emancipating himself from dogma. In his old age he was a Unitarian.

You've forgotten The Pilgrim's Progress, written out of the very heart of the language, and out of the mind of the nation.

Thank you for reminding me of it. A manly fellow was Bunyan, without clerical unction, and a courage in his heart that nothing could cast down, the glory and symbol of Puritanism for ever and ever.

Puritanism is more inspiring than Protestantism; it is a more original attitude of mind—

The Agnostic mind is the original mind, the mind which we bring into the world.

Milton was a Unitarian, Bunyan a Puritan; where does your Protestantism come in? Who is the great Protestant poet?

I don't limit Protestantism to the Established Church. Protestantism is a stage in human development. But if you want a poet who would shed the last drop of his blood for the Established Church, there is one, Wordsworth, and he is still considered to be a pretty good poet; Coleridge was nearly a divine.

You make a point with Wordsworth, I admit it. He seems, however, to have overstepped the line in his Intimations of Immortality.

But you miss my point somewhat; it is that there is hardly any line of Protestantism to overstep.

I set Newman against—

Against whom? Not against Wordsworth, surely? And if you do, think of the others—shall I enumerate?

It wouldn't be worth while; it is evident that all that is best in England has gone into Agnosticism.

And into Protestantism; confronted by Wordsworth and Coleridge, you can't deny to Protestantism a large share in the shaping of modern poetry. But there isn't a Catholic writer, only a few converts.

Newman.

But, my dear Colonel, we cannot for one moment compare Newman's mind to Wordsworth's or Coleridge's? To do so I may contend is ridiculous, without laying myself open to a charge of being much addicted to either writer. Wordsworth moralised Nature away, and it is impossible, for me, at least, to forgive him his:

A primrose by a river's brim A yellow primrose was to him, And it was nothing more.

That nothing more is a moral stain that no time shall wash away. One would have thought that flowers, especially wild flowers, might be freed from all moral obligations. I am an Objectivist, reared among the Parnassians, an exile from the Nouvelle Athènes, and neither poet has ever unduly attracted me. Three or four beautiful poems more or less in the world are not as important as a new mind, a new way of feeling and seeing. Mere writing—

A theory invented on the spot so as to rid yourself of Newman.

There you are mistaken. Allow me to follow the train of my thoughts, and you will understand me better. And don't lose your head and run away frightened if I dare to say that Newman could not write at all. But you have dislocated my ideas a little. Allow me to continue in my own way, for what I'm saying to you today will be written tomorrow or after, and talking my mind to you is a great help. I'm using you as an audience. Now, we were speaking about Coleridge, and I was saying that the mere fact that a man has written three or four beautiful poems is not enough; my primary interest in a writer being in the mind that he brings into the world; by a mind I mean a new way of feeling and seeing. I think I've said that before, but no harm is done by repeating it.

If you'll allow me to interrupt you once more, I will suggest that Newman brought a new way of feeling and seeing into the world—a new soul.

I suppose he did; a sort of ragged weed which withered on till it was ninety. It is a mistake to speak of him as a convert to Catholicism; he was a born Catholic if ever a man was born one. Were it not for him the term a born Catholic would be a solecism, for at first sight it doesn't seem very easy to understand how a man can be born a Catholic. A man is born blind, or deaf, or dumb, a hunchback, or an idiot, but it's difficult to see how he can be born a Catholic. Yet it is so; Newman proves it. A born Catholic would seem to mean one predisposed to rely upon the help of priests, sacraments, texts, amulets, medals, indulgences; and Newman, you will not deny, brought into the world an inordinate appetite for texts, decrees, councils, and the like; even when he was a Protestant he was always talking about his Bishop. He was disposed from the beginning to seek authority for his every thought. Obedience in spiritual matters is the watchword of the Catholic, and surely Newman was always replete with it. He was a born Catholic; he justified the phrase. My dear Colonel, I'm aware that I'm delivering a little sermon, but to speak to you like this is a great help to me. He seems to have been the least spiritual of men, bereft of all sense of divinity. He seems to have lived his life in ignorance that religion existed before Christianity, that Buddhism preceded it, and that in China—But we need not wander so far afield. Newman was a sectarian, if ever there was one, astride on a rail between Protestantism and Catholicism, timidly letting down one leg, drawing it back, and then letting down the other leg. In the 'sixties men were frightened lest their ancestors might turn out to be monkeys, and a great many ran after Newman clapping their hands in praise of his broken English.

Broken English! interrupted the Colonel.

Yes, broken mutterings about an Edict in the fourth century, and that the world has been going astray ever since. He seems to have really believed that the destiny of nations depended on the chatter of the Fathers, and he totters after them, like an old man in a dark corridor with a tallow dip in his hand. A simple-minded fellow, who meant well, I think; one can see his pale soul through his eyes, and his pale style is on his face. The best that can be said about it is that it is homely. You never saw The Private Secretary, did you?

The Colonel shook his head.

When Mr Spalding came on the stage, saying, I obey my Bishop, I at once thought of Newman, and, though I have no shred of evidence to support my case, I shall always maintain that that amusing comedy was suggested by The Apologia. It seems to have risen out of it, and I can imagine the writer walking up and down his study, his face radiant, seeing Mr Spalding as a human truth, a human objectification of an interest in texts, decrees, and in Bishops. I never thought of it before, but Newman confesses to Mr Spalding's wee sexuality in The Apologia. I have been reading The Apologia this morning, and for the first time. Here it is:

I am obliged to mention, though I do it with great reluctance, another deep imagination, which at this time, the autumn of 1816, took possession of me—there can be no mistake about the fact; viz., that it would be the will of God that I should lead a single life. This anticipation, which has held its ground almost continuously ever since—with the break of a month now and a month then, up to 1829, and, after that date, without any break at all—was more or less connected in my mind with the notion, that my calling in life would require such a sacrifice as celibacy involved.

He is himself in this paragraph, and nothing but himself. Even on a subject in which his whole life concerned he can only write dryly.

And we wrangled for some time over the anticipation which had held its ground almost continuously.

I admit that it isn't very good; but how do you explain that he has always been considered a master of English?

All in good time, my dear Colonel. We are now concerned with Newman's mind; it is the mind that produces the style. Listen to this:



This passage, I believe, was read with considerable piety and interest by the age which produced it, and I wonder why it has fallen out of favour; for to sentimentalise is to succeed, and it was really very kind of Newman to sentimentalise over the miseries which our lightest sins cause our Creator. An unfortunate case his is indeed, since the Catholic Church holds that venial sins are committed every moment of the day and night. The Creator torments us after we are dead by putting us into hell, but while we are on earth we give him hell. And our difficulties don't end with the statement that we make the Creator's life a hell for him, for we are told that it would be better that all humanity should perish in extremest agony than that, etc. If that be so, why doesn't the Creator bring humanity to an end? The only possible answer to this question is that the Creator and the Catholic Church are not agreed on the point, and it would be pretentious on my part to offer arbitration. They must settle their differences as best they can. I'm afraid, Colonel, you look at me a little contemptuously, as if you thought my criticism frivolous.

Logically, of course, the Colonel answered—logically, of course, Newman is right.

We wasted at least ten minutes discussing how something that seemed utterly absurd could be said to be logical; and to bring the discussion to an end, I reminded the Colonel that Carlyle had said that Newman's mind was not much greater than that of a half-grown rabbit. Perhaps Carlyle libelled the rabbit; he should have said the brain of a half-grown insect, a blackbeetle.

But, said the Colonel, do you believe the blackbeetle to be less intelligent than the rabbit? In my experience—

I'm inclined to agree with you, but we're wandering from the point. I want to draw your attention to some passages, and to ask you if they are as badly written as they seem to be?

When you say that Newman wrote very badly, do you mean that he wrote in a way which does not commend itself to your taste, or that he wrote incorrectly?

His sentences are frequently incorrect, but I don't lay stress on their occasional incorrectness. An ungrammatical sentence is by no mean incompatible with beauty of style; all the great writers have written ungrammatically; I suppose idiom means ungrammatical phrases made acceptable by usage; dialect is generally ungrammatical; but Newman's slips do not help his style in the least. You're watching me, my dear Colonel, with a smile in your eyes, wondering into what further exaggeration my detestation of Catholicism will carry me.

You have abused Newman enough. Let us get to facts. You say that he writes incorrectly.

The passage in which he deplores the suffering that man causes God convinced me that his mind was but a weed, and, though there was no necessity for my doing so, I said: Let us see how he expresses himself. You will admit that a man of weak intellect cannot write a fine style.

Let us get to the grammatical blunders which you say you have discovered in Newman.

I turned to the first pages and read:

He, emphatically, opened my mind, and taught me to think and to use my reason.

Don't you think, Colonel, that emphatically opened my mind is a queer sentence for a master of English style to write, and that we should search in Carlyle or Landor a long while before we came upon such draggle-tailed English as we read on page 7?

He, emphatically, opened my mind, and taught me to think and to use my reason. After being first noticed by him in 1822, I became very intimate with him in 1825, when I was his Vice-Principal at Alban Hall. I gave up that office in 1826, when I became Tutor of my College, and his hold upon me gradually relaxed. He had done his work towards me or nearly so, when he taught me to see with my own eyes and to walk with my own feet. Not that I had not a good deal to learn from others still, but I influenced them as well as they me, and co-operated rather than merely concurred with them. As to Dr Whately, his mind was too different from mine for us to remain long on one line.

I know folks that is in the vegetable line, and I think I know one chap who should be tuk up for the murder of the King's English if he warn't dead already.

I recollect how dissatisfied he was with an Article of mine in the London Review, which Blanco White, good-humouredly, only called Platonic. When I was diverging from him in opinion (which he did not like), I thought of dedicating my first book to him, in words to the effect that he had not only taught me to think, but to think for myself. He left Oxford in 1831; after that, as far as I can recollect, I never saw him but twice, when he visited the University; once in the street in 1834, once in a room in 1838. From the time that he left, I have always felt a real affection for what I must call his memory; for, at least from the year 1834, he made himself dead to me. He had practically indeed given me up from the time that he became Archbishop in 1831; but in 1834 a correspondence took place between us,

A prize fight takes place; a correspondence begins.

which, though conducted, especially on his side, in a friendly spirit, was the expression of differences of opinion which acted as a final close to our intercourse. My reason told me that it was impossible we could have got on together longer, had he stayed in Oxford; yet I loved him too much to bid him farewell without pain. After a few years had passed, I began to believe that his influence on me in a higher respect than intellectual advance,

He means than that of intellectual advance.

(I will not say through his fault) had not been satisfactory. I believe that he has inserted sharp things in his later works about me. They have not come in my way, and I have not thought it necessary to seek out what would pain me so much in the reading.

The next page consists mainly of quotations from Dr Whately, who apparently is capable of expressing himself, and we pick up Newman farther on.

The case was this: though at that time I had not read Bishop Bull's Defensio nor the Fathers, I was just then very strong for that ante-Nicene view of the Trinitarian doctrine, which some writers, both Catholic and non-Catholic, have accused of wearing a sort of Arian exterior.

I really don't see, said the Colonel, that that sentence is—

Don't trouble to defend it. There is worse to come. But how is it that the writer of such sentences is still spoken about as a master of style? Am I the only man living who has read The Apologia? It is almost impossible to read; that I admit.

It would be against my nature to act otherwise than I do; but besides, it would be to forget the lessons which I gained in the experience of my own history in the past.

One doesn't gain lessons. How shall we amend it?—the experience I gained from the lessons of my own history.

The Bishop has but said that a certain Tract is objectionable, no reason being stated.

Without giving his reasons, the Bishop has only said that a certain Tract is objectionable, is how the editor of the halfpenny paper would probably revise Newman's sentence. And who will say that the revised text is not better than the original?

As I declared on occasion of Tract 90, I claimed, in behalf of who would in the Anglican Church,

Can he mean those who so desired in the Anglican Church? But it would take too long to put this passage right, for it is impossible to know exactly what the greatest master of lucid English meant—

the right of holding with Bramhall a comprecation with the Saints, and the Mass all but Transubstantiation with Andrewes, or with Hooker that Transubstantiation itself is not a point for Churches to part communion upon,

The kind of English that one would rap a boy of twelve over the knuckles for writing!

or with Hammond that a General Council, truly such, never did, never shall err in a matter of faith,

A thousand years of Catholicism is needed to write like this, so perhaps the present Duke of Norfolk is the author of The Apologia.

or with Bull that man had in Paradise, and lost on the fall, a supernatural habit of grace,

The style is the man, a simpleton cleric, especially anxious about his soul; no, I am mistaken—about a Text.

or with Thorndike that penance is a propitiation for post-baptismal sin, or with Pearson that the all-powerful name of Jesus is no otherwise given than in the Catholic Church.

What does he mean by given? In what sense? Does he mean that the name of Jesus is rendu in all churches in the same way? But, then, what exactly does he mean by given?

The Colonel, who writes a letter to a newspaper as well as anybody I know, took the book from my hand, saying:

It is barely credible ... I can write as well as that myself.

A great deal better, I answered, and we continued to look through The Apologia, astonished at the feebleness of the mind behind the words, and at the words themselves.

Like dead leaves, I said.

What surprises me is the lack of distinction, the Colonel murmured.

If the writing were a little worse it would be better, I answered. Am I going too far, my dear Colonel, if I say that The Apologia reads more like a mock at Catholic literature than anything else; and that it would pass for such if we didn't know that it was written in great seriousness of spirit, and read with the same seriousness? No Protestant divine ever wrote so badly. Perhaps Newman—

Haven't you read anything but The Apologia?

No, and there is no reason why I should.

How would you like to be judged by one book?

I have shown my friends the passages I have been quoting, and they think he wrote better when he was a Protestant.

I see your article on Newman from end to end. That Newman was a great writer until he became a Catholic is a pretty paradox which will suit your style. You will be able to discover passages in his Protestant sermons better written, no doubt, than the passages you select from The Apologia. The Colonel lit his candle, and I could hear him laughing good-humouredly as he went upstairs to bed.

It is dangerous to name a quality, I said to him next morning at breakfast, whereby we may recognise a great writer, for as soon as we have done so somebody names somebody whom we must confess deficient in the quality mentioned. The perils of definition are numerous, but most people will agree with me that all great writers have possessed an extraordinary gift of creating images, and if that be so, Newman cannot be called a writer. We search vainly in the barren, sandy tract of The Apologia for one, finding only dead phrases, very often used so incorrectly that it is difficult to tell what he is driving at; driving at is just the kind of worn-out phrase he would use without a scruple.

You are judging Newman by The Apologia.

I admit I haven't read any other book. But dear Edward once invited me to look into—I have forgotten the title, but I remember the sentence that caught my eye—Heresy stalks the land, and you will agree with me that it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the average reporter would be ashamed to write the words ... unless he were in a very great hurry.

Newman wrote The Apologia in a great hurry.

However great your hurry, you couldn't, nor could any of the friends who came here on Saturday night, write as badly, and unless we hold that to be always thin and colourless is a style—

You've a good case against him, but I'm afraid you'll spoil it by overstatement.

My concern is neither to overstate nor to understate, but to follow my own mind, faithfully, tracing its every turn. An idea has been running in my head that books lose and gain qualities in the course of time, and I have worried over it a good deal, for what seemed to be a paradox I felt to be a truth. Our fathers were not so foolish as they appear to us to be in their admiration of Lara, The Corsair, The Bride of Abydos, The Giaour; they breathed into the clay and vivified it, and when weary of romance they wandered into theology, and were lured by a mirage, seeing groves of palm-trees, flowers, and a bubbling rill, where in truth there was nothing but rocks and sand and a puddle. And while Byron and Newman turn to dust Shakespeare is becoming eternal.

There are degrees, then, in immortality?

Of course. The longer the immortality the more perfect it becomes, Time putting a patina upon the bronze and the marble and wood, and I think upon texts; you never will persuade me that the text that we read is the text read in 1623.

The Colonel raised his sad eyes from The Apologia into which they had been plunged.

I'll admit that we never seem to get any further in metaphysics than Bishop Berkeley. I see, he said a few minutes later, that Newman has written a preface for this new and insufficiently revised edition. Have you read it?

No, but I shall be glad to listen if you'll read it to me after breakfast.

As soon as he had finished his eggs and bacon, the Colonel fixed his glasses a little higher on his nose, and it was not long before we began to feel that our tasks were hard, one as hard as the other, and when the last sentence was pronounced, the Colonel, despite his reluctance to decry anything Catholic, was forced to admit a lack of focus in the composition.

He wanders from one subject to another, never finishing.

Excellent criticism! What you say is in agreement with Stevenson, who told an interviewer that if a man can group his ideas he is a good writer, though the words in which he expresses himself be tasteless, and as you say, Newman, before he has finished with his third section, returns to his first; from the fifth he returns to the fourth, and in the sixth section we find some points that should have been included in the second.

The Colonel did not answer; and feeling that I owed something to my guest, I said:

The last time you were here you mentioned that you hoped to be able to get one of the gateways from Newbrook.

The Colonel brightened up at once, and told me that he was only just in time, for the stones were about to be utilised by the peasants for the building of pigsties and cottages. But he had followed them in his gig through the country, and had brought them all to Moore Hall, and was now only waiting for me to decide whether I would like the gateway built in a half-circle or in a straight line. The saw-mill he hoped to get into working order very soon.

It will be of great use for cutting up the timber that we shall get out of the stone park.

Isn't it in working order?

With emphasis and interest the Colonel began to relate the accident the saw-mill had met with on the way from Ballinrobe; as it was entering the farmyard one of the horses had shied, bringing the boiler right up against a stone pillar, starting some of the rivets. A dark cloud came into his face, and I learnt from him that he had very foolishly given heed to the smith at Ballinrobe, a braggart who had sworn he could rivet a boiler with any man in Ireland; but when it came to the point he could do nothing. The Castlebar smith, a very clever man, had not succeeded any better, but there was a smith at Cong—

A real Cuchulain.

The story, I admit, is assuming all the proportions of an epic, the Colonel replied joyously, and I allowed him to tell me the whole of it, listening to it with half my brain, while with the other half I considered the height of the Colonel's skull and its narrowness across the temples.

A refined head, I said to myself, and it seemed to me that I had seen, at some time or other, the same pinched skull in certain portraits of ecclesiastics by Bellini and the School of Bellini: but not the Colonel's vague, inconclusive eyes, I added. Italy has always retained a great deal of her ancient paganism; but Catholicism absorbed Spain and Ireland. It is into Spanish painting that we must look for the Colonel, and we find most of him in Velasquez, a somewhat icy painter who, however, relished and stated with great skill the Colonel's high-pitched nose, the drawing of the small nostrils, the hard, grizzled moustache. He painted the true Catholic in all his portraits of Philip, never failing to catch the faded, empty look that is so essentially a part of the Catholic face. Our ideas mould a likeness quickly if Nature supplies certain proportions, and the Colonel—when he fattens out a little, which he sometimes does, and when his mind is away—reminds me of the dead King. Of course, there are dissimilarities. Kingship creates formalities, and the Spanish Court must have robbed Philip of all sense of humour, or buried it very deeply in his breast, for it is recorded that he was so pleased on one occasion with the splendid fight that a bull put up against the picadors, that he did not deem any swordsman in Spain worthy of the honour of killing him; the bull had earned his death from the highest hand in the land, and arming himself with an arquebuse or caliver, he walked across the arena and shot the bull with his own kingly hand. He must have walked towards the bull with a kingly stride—a sloven stride and a kingly act would be incompatible—he must have walked as if to music; but the Colonel has little or no ear for music, and his walk is, for this reason or another, the very opposite to Philip's. He slouches from side to side, a curious gait, the reader will say, for a soldier of thirty years, but very like himself, and therefore one likes to see it, and to see him preparing for it, hustling himself into his old yellow overcoat in the passage. He never carries a stick or umbrella; he slouches along, his hands dangling ugly out of the ends of the cuffs. To what business he is going I often wonder as I stand at the window watching him, remembering all the while how he had lain back in his armchair after breakfast, reading a book, his subconsciousness suggesting to him many different errands, and at last detaching him from his book or his manuscript, for the Colonel has always meditated a literary career for himself as soon as he was free from the army.

There are people of today, tomorrow, and yesterday; and the Colonel is much more of yesterday than of today. If he does not defend the Inquisition directly, he does so indirectly—all religions have persecuted, for it is the nature of man to persecute, and he is unable to understand that Protestantism and Rationalism together redeemed the world from the disgrace of the Middle Ages. His ideas clank like chains about him, but not to the ordinary ear, for the Colonel is reserved by nature; only a fine ear can hear the clanks. Balzac would never have thought of the Colonel for a modern story, but would have placed him—I have sufficient confidence in Balzac's genius to believe that he would have placed him in a Spanish setting; for the Colonel's mind is so archaic that his clothes distress even me. I am not good at clothes, but I am sure it is because his natural garment, the doublet, is forbidden him that he dresses himself in dim grey hues or in pepper-and-salt. He has never been seen in checks or fancy waistcoats, or in a bright-coloured tie. He goes, however, willingly into breeches; at Moore Hall he is never out of breeches; breeches remind him of his racing and hunting days, besides being convenient. So far can his country gear be explained, but why he sometimes comes up to Dublin in breeches, presenting, as I have said, an incongruous spectacle of sport in my drawing-room on a background of impressionist pictures, I am unable to offer any opinion.