DANIEL O'CONNELL AND ISAAC BUTT.

O'C. And pray why so serious, my worthy Butt? Your face, man, is long enough to dash the hilarity of Pluto himself. Come, what is it?

B. Can you ask, Mr. O'Connell? Our unhappy country! O'C. Oh, is that all? You greatly relieve me.

B. All! Mr. O'Connell! You greatly astonish me. O'C. Do I? You will be less easily astonished when you have been here as long as I have.

B. I am sorry to hear it. interest for us in the Shades?

Does then our country lose all

O'C. Far from it. The interest takes a different shape, that is all.

B. In your case, sir-forgive my freedom-it would seem to have taken a shape that strangely resembles indifference, yet I should have thought that the Liberator

O'C. Had already done enough for Ireland and Irishmen to entitle him to dismiss them from his mind? That at least is what I should have thought.

B. You surely jest, Mr. O'Connell. Those who have received benefits from a man of generosity, like yourself, become the dearer to him in consequence. Fortunately for mankind, there is a bright converse to that terrible

aphorism, Odisse quem laeseris. Amare cui benefeceris is at least as true; and by that rule, sir, your solicitude for Ireland should be as eternal as your services.

O'C. You have the national tongue, Isaac: but to have kissed the Blarney stone is of no avail down here. Solicitude for Ireland, is it? I loved Ireland with all my soul; not even that bitter Jew who distilled his blackest venom on me ever dared to question that. I loved her and I love her still. If help in her troubles could go forth to her from this abode of the departed, God knows it should not be wanting from me. But even the living patriot cannot help her to happiness, let alone the dead.

B. Mr. O'Connell! The living cannot help her? O'C. Not to happiness, sir; and it is that perpetual cry . of "our

our unhappy country" that I refuse to listen to. Politics and politicians can no more give happiness to a people than drugs and doctors can give it to a man.

B. God bless me! This is very unlike the O'Connell of national legend. It is almost the language of those sneering Englishmen who are ever bidding us Irish desist from political agitation and cultivate those Saxon virtues in which they pretend to find us so deficient.

O'C. Indeed! So a man is to be charged with indifference to the ailments of his friend because he warns him that health of body is not the same thing as peace of mind. The Englishman seeks to perpetuate the political maladies of Ireland because he wishes to keep her weak, and he cares not a rush whether she is happy or not. I desire, like every true Irishman, to procure her restoration to political health, not as ensuring and still less as

constituting happiness, but as enabling her to compass it for herself.

B. But how? By the cultivation of virtues which she at present lacks?

O'C. I am not on the witness table, Mr. Butt; nor will I allow you to presume upon my historic candour in this way.

B. If you are unwilling to answer, sir, it is not for me, of course, to press you. But you certainly never told your countrymen that they lacked anything which the English could give them, except justice.

O'C. I told my countrymen, sir, as much truth as was good for them, and the English as much truth as was good for my countrymen.

B. Englishmen, however, complained bitterly, I have · always heard, of the scantiness of the supply.

O'C. The Whigs did, but you could never satisfy a Whig with anything; and they had special reasons for being covetous of that commodity. I am sorry enough now, egad, that I wasted any good veracity on the dirty sneaks at all.

B. But is it not just possible, sir-if I may be excused so audacious a question—that you might have better served your own and your country's cause if you had dealt a little more liberally with them in that matter?

O'C. No, Isaac, it is not just possible. How can one possibly be too chary of truth to a swindler?

B. The Whigs complained that you were too untrustworthy for them to act with you.

O'C. That meant that they couldn't trust me to honour

my acceptance when I found they had lent me flash notes upon it.

B. But why then did you have any dealings with them at all?

O'C. That's not a very business-like question. You can only traffic with those from whom you want something, and who want something of you. If they are not to be trusted, the utmost you can do with them is to prevent their cheating you; or rather, that was the utmost I could do with them under the circumstances and conditions of my time. Our “unhappy country," as you call her, is in a far better position now. Its leaders have perfected the parliamentary machine that I constructed, but did not live long enough to develop; and thank God there is no more danger of their being cajoled by any English party, be it Whig, Tory or Radical. They are masters of the

situation.

B. Good Heavens! Mr. O'Connell, you amaze me. Is it possible that you can approve of the present attitude and proceedings of the Irish Parliamentary party?

Do you

O'C. In the devil's name, why not, man? suppose that I gave up wealth and ease, that I faced danger and obloquy, that I spent strength and life in wresting that weapon of representation from the hand of England, and then gave it to my countrymen to look at? B. No; but you did not use it as your successors are using it.

O'C. Because I had no time allowed me to teach my country how to use it effectively at all.

B. Indeed, sir? Not in seventeen years?

O'C. What are seventeen years in the life of a nation? Nay what are they in the life of a man past fifty, exhausted by a long career of incessant strife, and menaced in his power and popularity by younger men?

B. And yet there were no signs of senile weakness in your bearing. You faced your young rivals with

out fear.

O'C. Whom did I ever fear to face? I had met and vanquished bigger men than they. But I soon saw that they were winning, and it broke my heart. What wonder? To whose old age has it ever yet happened to see so glorious a work of his manhood seized upon at the very moment of its completion, to be marred and ruined by the hands of ignorant youth? Forged in the fire of conflict, tempered in the icy waters of discouragement, edged and pointed on the whetstone of toil, there lay the good sword which I had won for my country-the sword of parliamentary action-despised and doomed, as I knew too surely, to years of disuse and rust; while hard by strutted "Young Ireland " to the fife and drum of his own shrill and hollow rhetoric, and brandishing the schoolboy lath of insurrection above his addled head.

B. It was indeed an hour of national madness, as many of the wiser even among our own youth were but too sadly aware.

O'C. What then must it have seemed to me-to me who had been a witness of the vain heroism, the barren bloodshed of '98-to me who bore in my breast the conviction, deep-graven as it only can be when the hand of horror traces it on the heart of youth, that the last hope of