sion; with a skull curiously round; with a figure graceful, lithe, yet of well-strung muscles, capable of great endurance. It is a type which some Irish ethnologists suppose, not without reason, to be of Spanish origin; and there were two very remarkable Irishmen of the same period who were fine examples of its form. One was General Clarke, Duc de Feltre, French minister of war throughout, and indeed before, Napoleon's reign, and who was also for some time Governor-general of Prussia; the other, not built on so grand a scale, was Thomas Moore, the poet. Nature gave to Mr. O'Connell a frame as perfect and commanding as ever was developed of this rare type; a voice of unparalleled volume and range; ever-buoyant energy, unfatiguing perseverance, a quick wit, a sound and capacious understanding, craft bred and stimulated by the sense of oppression, courage easily flaming to headlong wrath at the hurt to pride of withheld right; every talent that every great orator has possessed (some in excess), with, most of all, the talent of speaking in the strain of its own sympathies to every audience, from the highest and most accomplished to the lowest and most ignorant; and to these last he often spoke of his best, and he loved to speak best of all. In Kerry there still remained, a hundred years ago, there even yet remains, more that tells of what Celtic and Catholic Ireland was like than in any other district of the south. Many of the native gentry, elsewhere banished and erased, or reduced to become traders in the towns built by their ancestors and tenants on their own estates, in Kerry held some little-coveted fragment of ancient property on sufferance, and maintained at least the show among their people of the old tribal order. Of the Irish titles which are still borne by the heads of Celtic septs, by far the greater number were transmitted in Kerry, or in neighbouring districts of Cork and Limerick," where the king's writ did not run.' There or thereabouts, in the wild south-west, dwelt a hundred years ago, and there are still to be seen, representatives of The O'Donoghue of the Glens (near kinsmen of the O'Connells), O'Grady of Killballyowen, MacGillicuddy of the Reeks, The O'Donovan, The O'Driscoll-and two titles which, though only dating from the period of the Pale, told of traditions hardly less dear to the Irish memory and imagination, the Knight of Glin and the Knight of Kerry, scions of that illustrious house which for many a hundred years accepted for its motto the reproach

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that it was more Irish than the Irish themselves. Five years before O'Connell's birth died the last MacCarthy More, greatest of the Kerry toparchs, and lineal descendant of that Florence MacCarthy who, as Sir William Herbert once said, was a man infinitely adored in Munster:" and now Kerry was about to give birth to a man destined to be infinitely adored throughout Ireland. Kerry still spoke the Irish tongue, and it was the tongue that Daniel O'Connell learned on his nurse's knee. Such was the soil from which he sprung, and he was racy of it..

It is very difficult to apply the standard of historical criticism to Mr. O'Connell's character and career without at least seeming to speak in a strain of hyperbole. Lord Lytton, in those lines of singular power and felicity which describe him in the act of addressing a monster meeting, raises the image of the great Athenian orator as the fitting illustration of his marvellous mind-compelling power and majestic energy and ease of speech. But even his enemies would have said that Demosthenes was not his perfect parallel; that he had all the craft of Ulysses, and, when he pleased, the tongue of Thersites as well. In our modern days the son of a Corsican notary, immediately after the most all-levelling revolution the world has as yet witnessed, implanted a worship of himself in the heart of the French nation, surpassing in its self-sacrificing devotion all the loyalty ever lavished on its bravest and holiest kings. But Napoleon was a great soldier, and empires are the natural estate of conquerors, and from a very early age he had the whole power of the government of France to work out his purposes. O'Connell had the whole power of the government which conquered Napoleon, wielded at last by the soldier who gave him his final defeat, opposed to him at every point, and from the beginning to the end of his great achievement; and his method was to try if it were possible to make the same use of peace as a means of victory that soldiers make of war. He led his people out of bondage not less ignominious than the Egyptian, through a probation that may fitly be compared, even in point of time, with that of the Sinaitic desert, and, on the whole, with perhaps a better behaviour on the part of those who followed him; yet he was not visibly, awfully, raised and inspired by the living God, face to face, as Moses was. career is unique. From its commencement to its close he carried the whole apparatus of his

His

(FROM THE "DUBLIN REVIEW.")

The state of Ireland throughout the autumn and winter which have passed may be likened to a day such as often comes on its western coast, when the one season is passing into the other, and all the elements seem to be mingled in the weather. Overhead masses of cloud, gaunt and vast, career across a sky at one moment muffled in gloomy vapour fringed with fire, at another so blue, so lofty, and so clear, that the pale light of the moon and the strong ray of the northern star aid in its atmosphere the labouring flame which strives almost in vain to assert the realm of day. He who hears the ocean break, when in those days the indefatigable sou'-wester hurls wave after wave against the mountain scarp of the coast of Clare, will not find much of melancholy in the music with which the Atlantic first hails the shores of Ireland- but a sound like the cheering of many men in the stress of some great labour, with now and then an undertone of joyous melody, felt as it were through the sphere, when a tall billow, which

has made its boisterous way from Labrador, sinks to sudden rest on velvet sand under the echoing dome of some stalactite - incrusted cave. But when the tide ebbs at the same hour that the sun is setting in this climacteric of the year, then the cloud-compelling wind pauses for a while, and the peace which falls upon land and sea is, in the variety of its beauty, the depth of its serenity, and the extent of its horizon, peculiar to the place and of its genius. The broad golden track that marks the line of the sunset on the waters, visibly connects earth and sky. Nowhere does the sun sink in such an aureole of light and such a canopy of colour, with such a glow of longing ardour, and such a lingering pomp of promise. Nowhere in our latitudes are clouds to be seen of such strange shapes and such vivid colours - violet, vermilion and purple, and crimson and azure and orange, and the white of the dove's down, and the tender green of young leaves. Weary ocean makes a truce with land, and seems to have changed its hue for that of the invincible verdure, which gleams through every fissure of the scarred rocks and mantles the stalwart battlements of the bay. Already the dawning moonlight falls softly on the venerable cone of that Round Tower on Scattery's holy isle, where Christ was worshipped first in the far west; and bleaches the sails of the Bostonbound emigrant-ship rushing swiftly over the bar on the flood of the Shannon.

volumes of her collected stories have also appeared. She has also translated a number of works from the French, including Pictorial Life in Japan, The Government of M. Thiers, &c.

Mrs. Hoey is a constant contributor to high-class periodical literature, being perhaps at her best in such writings as a critic. She has written, besides, the following works:A House of Cards, Falsely True, Out of Court, The Blossoming of an Aloe, A Golden Sorrow,

Our extract is taken from No Sign-one of her shorter tales-in our opinion the most powerful thing she has written.]

A TERRIBLE INTERVIEW.1

[Dominick Daly is in jail on a charge of murdering his wife. The crime has really been committed by Kate Farrell, a woman by

By permission of the authoress.

whom Daly is loved. The following passage describes an interview in the jail between the two.]

"Person to see you; governor's order," or some such words, met the prisoner's ear, as he sprang to his feet in a moment. The next, the prison official had slammed and locked the door, and he and his visitor were alone. Another, and the woman had flung herself upon him, not into his arms-for he did not make any movement-but, with her own clasped tightly round him, had forced him back into the chair from which he had risen, and was kneeling beside him, still holding him in that frantic grasp.

"Dominick! Dominick!"

"Katharine! Great heavens! You here!" They were almost the same words that he had said to her the last time she had come unexpectedly into his presence; but the voice in which he said them was not like his voice, and his face was like a spectre's. She shifted the clasp of her arms, and raised them to his shoulders; she pressed her face against his rigid breast, and ground her teeth together with a shivering moan.

His arms were free now, but he did not move them; he did not put her from him, or draw her to him; he sat perfectly still, as if the touch of her had turned him to stone. Her face was quite hidden, the brow and eyes were squeezed against his rough coat, and she caught the cloth in her teeth, while she fought with a strong convulsive agony, and put it over her.

"I'm here, I'm here, at last. I wasn't able to come sooner, for my strength played me false, and left me; but it's come back, darling, and I'm here. I'm strong again; I'm strong enough for what I have to do."-Again she shivered, and ground her teeth, and hid her face yet more closely against his rigid breast. And still he did not move, but he shut his eyes fast, and breathed like a tired runner.

"And what's that, Katharine?"

She looked up, strained her head back, saw his face distinctly, loosed her hold of him, and sunk on the floor, gazing awe-stricken at him. Her face was thin and white, her almost colourless eyes were dim, but there looked out of them a terrible despair.

"What's that?' he asks me. To tell you the truth all the truth-and then to tell it to them, and take you out of this."

He pushed his chair back beyond her reach as she sat huddled on the floor, and spoke, but without looking at her.

"I know the truth, not all of it, but enough -all I want to know. For God's sake, tell me nothing, and go, go!"

"You know! What do you mean?" Her voice almost died away with some terror, with some sickening anguish, stronger than that which had rent her soul when she came into the prison room. "You can't know. Why don't you look at me, Dominick? Why won't you touch me? Why don't you kiss me?" She raised herself to a kneeling attitude, and dragged herself a few inches along the ground towards him; but he stopped her with an outstretched hand.

"Come no nearer me," he said; "you are my wife's murderess." He spoke in the lowest whisper, and with his gaze upon the door.

"O God! And I did it for your sake!"

After this there is a silence, and the two look in each other's faces, as two lost souls might look. Then the woman begins to speak, low and rapidly; and as she speaks, she sinks back into her former attitude, but tears off her bonnet, and clutches the masses of her thick red hair, which have fallen on her neck, and pulls at them wildly.

"I did it for your sake. I had been thinking about it, about how it could be done, ever since that night when Father John O'Connor spoke to you-the same night that you told me she wanted you to send her a new cure. It was that night you vexed me to the soul; for you pitied her, and would not grudge her the life that was no good to her, and was standing between you and me. And after that you vexed me sorer and sorer; for you sent her cures, and I thought they were like to do with her, for she grew no worse; and the time was creeping on, and the priest was watching you and me. And then came the strong and heavy hand of him upon me, and he said I must go-go away to a strange place, and leave you, after all the pains it cost me to come where you were, and to stay where you were. I must go, and you must stay, and be no nearer to me than in the beginning, when I could have lived without you, Dominick Daly. And then I thought how little good her life was to herself, and how much harm to us, and how easily it might be ended, if only I could get some way of sending her

a cure.

"The way of getting the-stuff came to my mind readily. I had only to get back to Athboyle, for ever so short a time, and Sam Sullivan would not watch what I was doing in the shop so close but that I could get some

thing that would not hurt her much, but would put her out of your way and mine."

He listened, after a fruitless attempt to stop her, with a fascinated eagerness, but with growing horror and avoidance, as the words came more and more coherently from her livid lips. "I swear I could swear it if it were the last word I had to speak in this world-I_ never thought that she would have anything to suffer. I knew nothing about-about poison that tortured. I believed that poison only put people to sleep for ever; and when I got at it, through Dr. Mangan's leaving his keys about, it was laudanum I was looking for; but when I found the powder I had no other notion but that it would be all the same, only easier to get it sent to her somehow. But I never could think of a way of sending it, and I carried it about in my pocket day after day, until that day I went to see you at Grange's, and you went out to speak to some one, and left me in the room with the letter you had just written to her, and the cure you were sending to her. I read the letter, and I saw the opportunity. Who was to know? She would just take the powder you were sending her, and some of mine in it, and she would go to sleep for ever; and we would be quit of her, and happy, happy, happy, ever after."

She rocked herself from side to side, pulling at her hair, and he listened, appalled.

"You stayed away a good while, and I made up the powder; and when we went out you put it in the post; and the next I heard of it was the news that she was dead, and you were taken -you, as innocent as the daylight, Dominick, my darling. And, first, I nearly died with the fright, and the helplessness; but then I saw that there was something for me to do, and I did it."

She paused, and checked the swaying of her body. Her hands hung in the heavy loops of her red hair. Something like a smile came for a moment into her face.

"I got into the place the horrid place at Kilkevin; it was close to my new school-house --and I picked acquaintance with the servants, and I set fire to the laboratory. I went very near to saving myself and you that time."

"Stop, stop; for God's sake, stop!" said Daly, hoarsely. "What's the use?"

"Very near to saving myself and you," she went on, as if he had not spoken, knitting her brows into a frown; "but fate was against me. And then I fell sick. I don't know any more, until two days ago, and then I got well enough to come here."

"Why did you come? Oh, why did you come?"

"He asks me!" she said again. "He asks me! I came for the same reason that made me do everything else that I have done; because I love you, and I must take you out of this now."

Was she mad? Had the crime turned her brain? or rather had she committed the crime because her brain was already turned? In his mind, weary, although strained to the utmost pitch of excitement, he asked himself these questions. He was awake to the imminent need of making her comprehend the full truth as regarded him and his determination; and he conquered the horror of speaking to her, a great horror, though the ruined wreck of the old guilty love floated somewhere on the surging waves of his troubled mind all the while. They would have little time, and there was much to say.

So Daly rose, and lifted her from the floor. As his hand closed round her arm she kissed it quickly, roughly; but he did not heed the action. He placed her in the chair beside the table, and picked up her bonnet.

"Put this on," he said; "you haven't long to stay here; and now you are here, there's a great deal to be said. I prayed God that you might not come, but prayers of mine are not likely to get far on their way to heaven. I prayed that I might never see you again”— she started-"for your sake and my own. I hoped you were safe out of harm's way, when I knew it was you that did it." "How did you know?”

"I knew it from the first moment. I knew it because I remembered that night, and the feeling that came over me, like a warning, when you wished the sick woman dead. I knew because I deserved it--not how you did it, but that you had done it, and what the end must be."

"Yes, the end is easy to see," she said. "It would have come quicker if I could have stood, or walked, or been carried here, before to-day. But you'll forgive me for that, won't you? I wanted to tell you all, before I should tell the others."

"What others?"

"The gentlemen; and get you out of this. It's all over, and it seems a long, long time since I had the notion that we might be quit of her, and harm could never come to you. How should I have dreamed that harm could come, when your own letter seemed to make it secure?"