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consent to substitute the English conviction for their own.' My comment upon Mr. Gladstone's words is that they again express his old fallacy—namely, that our country is not united, but divided into four nations. We claim that, as a united people, we have, all of us, an 'integral' concern in the affairs of every part of our united country, and that our legislation must be determined by the majority of the whole representation. If we are to enter into an argument as to the relative amount of representation enjoyed by each part of the United Kingdom, Mr. Gladstone would find that it is England who might with justice complain that her population and relative amount of contribution to Imperial taxation entitle her to a larger share of representation than that which she enjoys. This, however, is at the moment beyond the scope of the question which has to be answered. That question is practically whether we are to grant that which, under the name of Home Rule,' Mr. Gladstone designates as 'the Irish demand.' Let us consider, first, whether the Irish demands of past years have been granted or refused, and what has been the result; secondly, what is the actual Irish demand' now, and what it implies and involves. I take Mr. Gladstone's own favourite worknamely, Mr. O'Connell's 'memoir'—and I find that his plain and straightforward' demand' was for the repeal of the Union.' He termed the Union a Living Lie,' and he did so for the following

reasons:

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First, because the Union entitled the Catholics of Ireland to religious equality with the English and Scotch."

Can any one deny that this equality, though too long delayed, has now been given?

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Secondly, the Union entitled the people of Ireland to the same elective franchise with the people of England.' In this respect the last Reform Bill has given that equality which Mr. O'Connell demanded for his countrymen.

Thirdly, the Union entitled the people of Ireland to an adequate portion of the representation in Parliament.' This, says Mr. O'Connell, has been scornfully and contemptuously refused.' It has now been granted to such an extent that complaints come from Great Britain of the over-representation accorded to Ireland.

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Fourthly, the Union entitled the people of Ireland to an identity of relief with England from corporate monopoly, bigotry, plunder, and abuse of every other kind.' These words are rather vague, and I own that I am unable to say whether they include a complaint concerning any grievance which has not yet been removed, but I am sure that there is none which they can comprehend to the removal of which, when once shown to be an inequality and a grievance, the British Parliament would not freely consent.

Add to this that the Protestant Church Establishment in Ireland has, for good or evil, been abolished, and how does the matter stand? Mr. O'Connell declared that Ireland demanded the repeal of the

Union because she had been refused 'Equality-Identity.' The first has been fully granted; the latter has been more than granted, because the only point of non-identity consists in the Irish branch of the Established Church having been disestablished in accordance with what was supposed to be the 'Irish demand.' What, then, is that demand to-day? Under the specious title of 'the privilege or the right for Ireland to manage her own affairs' the practical demand is not only for the repeal of the Union but for a great deal more. It is perfectly true that Mr. Gladstone speaks of a Union of heart and soul' to replace the 'paper Union,' at which he sneers; but let us look a little closer into the matter. This is not the demand" which is really made by those who claim to represent the Irish nation. Under cover of the demand to manage their own affairs' they desire to overthrow the settlements made by British parliaments in the past, and to introduce principles of legislation which can only be called 'principles ' by courtesy at the expense of truth. It is not only that they would permit tenants, far and wide, to break their legal contracts, and would subject landlords to an arbitrary reduction of rent, which would entail misery and ruin upon those who may have hitherto escaped those too frequent results of recent legislation. If words mean anything they would sweep away the present race of landlords altogether. This is no idle assertion. In the recent Parliamentary debates Mr. Parnell deliberately stated that almost every title to Irish land is founded on wholesale robbery and embezzlement." In the same debate Mr. Redmond declared himself the determined ' enemy of landlordism,' and in the Freeman's Journal of January 3 Mr. Dillon was reported to have said: "The soil of Ireland was the property of the children of Ireland, and not the property of the contemptible, rack-renting, ascendency landlords, whose fathers had robbed it from their fathers and from whom they would now take it. No doubt it would be difficult at the present time to discover the children of these plundered fathers, or to restore the lands to descendants of former possessors who themselves would be hard of discovery. No doubt also that the abolition of landlordism would be a difficult task, since the land must be owned by somebody, and a change of landlords is all that could be accomplished. But the words above quoted-only samples of expressions which might easily be multiplied a hundred fold—are ample evidence of the spirit in which Mr. Gladstone's Irish allies are prepared to deal with the question. The settlement of land 200 years ago is to count for nothing; the fact that probably three-fourths of the land of Ireland has, since that period, been bought and sold in open market is to be held of no account; the circumstance that the British Parliament has legislated again and again upon the subject of Irish land, and has given a Parliamentary title to its purchasers, is to stand them in no stead. Landlordism—or, to put it in the real sense in which the expression is intended, the race of landlords with a title derived from British

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influence and British legislation-is to be abolished, and the past settlement of Irish land to be swept away like a spider's web if it stand in the way of the Irish demand.' Are the British people prepared for this? Will the British democracy be ready to resist the calls for aid which will be made upon them by their brethren who have trusted to the faith of British parliaments, to bargains made under and according to the law, and to a settlement 200 years old? Will it be said that I am dealing in exaggeration? Hear another sample of what language is used in Ireland and what are the expectations which her people are taught to entertain. I have before me the Dundalk Examiner of January 15, containing the report of A Lecture on Irish Freedom,' delivered by the Rev. Eugene O'Sheehy, P.P., in the town of Dundalk. He justified his appearance by stating that so long as Ireland was torn, ground down, and despised as a province by a foreign and alien Government Irishmen expected the priests to come into line with them and to struggle and work until this island of ours takes her rightful place for evermore among the nations of Europe.' He stated that 'for 700 years Ireland had maintained the combat against England,' and that the struggle was for the restoration of land and property, and was continued at present by twenty millions of the Clan-a-gael.' From these interesting observations of a general character the reverend speaker presently condescended to particular statements, in one of which he justified the conduct of Father John Murphy in the rebellion of 1798 (for an account of whose murderous proceedings I refer my readers to Mr. Froude's English in Ireland, vol. iii., p. 434), and remarked that at that time 20,000 of the King's troops perished in Wexford alone, and how would it have been if thirty-two counties had taken united action?'

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I think I have said enough to show that concession in Mr. Gladstone's fashion to that which he designates the Irish demand involves far more than the simple granting that permission to manage local affairs which, under proper conditions, may and will be granted to every portion of the United Kingdom. The real point upon which the whole controversy turns is the question whether we are to be henceforward a united people, under one sovereign and under one parliament, or whether the claims of each of the nationalities which at present constitute our Union are to be advanced and pressed in such a manner as, commencing with a separation of Parliaments, must inevitably tend to separation of a still more vital character, and eventually either to a civil war or to the breaking up at once of our Union and our monarchy. To this question the people have given their answer at the last general election, and when the whole of the issues are more clearly before them and more certainly understood I confidently believe that the same answer will be repeated in a louder and more decisive tone.

BRABOURNE.

CYRIL TOURNEUR.

THEY, shut up under their roofs, the prisoners of darkness, and fettered with the bonds of a long night, lay exiled, fugitives from the eternal providence. For while they supposed to lie hid in their secret sins, they were scattered under a dark veil of forgetfulness, being horribly astonished, and troubled with sights. . . . Sad visions appeared unto them with heavy countenances. No power of the fire might give them light: neither could the bright flames of the stars endure to lighten that horrible night. Only there appeared unto them a fire kindled of itself, very dreadful: for being much terrified, they thought the things which they saw to be worse than the sight they saw not. . . . The whole world shined with clear light, and none were hindered in their labour: over them only was spread an heavy night, an image of that darkness which should afterwards receive them but yet were they unto themselves more grievous than the darkness.' In this wild world of fantastic retribution and prophetic terror the genius of a great English poet-if greatness may be attributed to a genius which holds absolute command in a strictly limited province of reflection and emotion-was born and lived and moved and had its being. The double mainspring of its energy is not difficult to define its component parts are simply adoration of good and abhorrence of evil: all other sources of emotion were subordinate to these love, hate, resentment, resignation, self-devotion, are but transitory agents on this lurid and stormy stage, which pass away and leave only the sombre fire of meditative indignation still burning among the ruins of shattered hopes and lives. More splendid success in pure dramatic dialogue has not been achieved by Shakespeare or by Webster, than by Cyril Tourneur in his moments of happiest invention or purest inspiration: but the intensity of his moral passion has broken the outline and marred the symmetry of his general design. And yet he was at all points a poet: there is an accent of indomitable self-reliance, a note of persistence and resistance more deep than any note of triumph, in the very cry of his passionate and implacable dejection, which marks him as different in kind from the race of the great prosaic pessimists whose scorn and hatred of mankind found expression in the contemptuous and ran

corous despondency of Swift or of Carlyle. The obsession of evil, the sensible prevalence of wickedness and falsehood, self-interest and stupidity, pressed heavily on his fierce and indignant imagination: yet not so heavily that mankind came to seem to him the 'damned race,' the hopeless horde of millions mostly fools' too foolish or too foul to be worth redemption, which excited the laughing contempt of Frederic the Great and the raging contempt of his biographer. On this point the editor to whom all lovers of high poetry were in some measure indebted for the first collection and reissue of his works has done much less than justice to the poet on whose text he can scarcely be said to have expended an adequate or even a tolerable amount of pains. A reader of his introduction who had never studied the text of his author might be forgiven if he should carry away the impression that Tourneur, as a serious or tragic poet, was little more than a better sort of Byron; a quack less impudent but not less transparent than the less inspired and more inflated ventriloquist of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage: whereas it is hardly too much to say that the earnest and fiery intensity of Tourneur's moral rhetoric is no less unmistakable than the blatant and flatulent ineptitude of Byron's.

It seems to me that Tourneur might say with the greatest of the Popes, 'I have loved justice, and hated iniquity: therefore I die in exile; therefore, in other words, I am cast aside and left behind by readers who are too lazy, too soft and slow of spirit, too sleepily sensual and self-sufficient, to endure the fiery and purgatorial atmosphere of my work. But there are breaths from heaven as surely as there are blasts from hell in the tumultuous and electric air of it. The cynicism and egotism which the editor already mentioned has the confidence to attribute to him are rather the outer garments than the inner qualities of his genius: the few and simple lines in which his purer and nobler characters are rapidly but not roughly drawn suffice to give them all due relief and all requisite attraction. The virtuous victims of the murderous conspirator whose crimes and punishment are the groundwork of The Atheist's Tragedy have life and spirit enough to make them heartily interesting: and the mixed character of Sebastian, the high-hearted and gallant young libertine whose fearless frankness of generosity brushes aside and breaks away the best-laid schemes of his father, is as vividly and gracefully drawn as any of the same kind on the comic or the tragic stage.

In this earlier of the two plays extant which preserve the name of Cyril Tourneur the magnificent if grotesque extravagance of the design may perhaps be partly accounted for by the didactic or devotional aim of the designer. A more appalling scarecrow or scarebabe, as the contemporaries of his creator would have phrased it, was certainly never begotten by orthodoxy on horror than the figure of

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