rejoiced exceedingly that the Cardinal Archbishop had shown so true and keen an appreciation of the cricket king. From this it was an easy transition to a talk about the days when Dr. Croke was a boy. He did not speak to me on the subject, but rumour says that His Grace does not conceal his sympathy with the noble art of self-defence, and it is probable that there are few in the Old Country who follow with more appreciative interest the reports which from time to time come from America of the stand-up combats which a humanitarian legislation has banished from the Old World.

One of the conspicuous ornaments on the walls of the spacious and airy library in St. Patrick's College is an

song after dinner, when that is the mood of the moment, and his guests are mellow with music and good fellowship. Archbishop Riordan, of San Francisco, one of more than a dozen Irish prelates to whom the ecclesiastical control of the great cities of America has been given, had been staying at Thurles just before my visit.

Archbishop Croke is said to be the best player of Forty-five in Ireland, while the Archbishop of San Francisco is the champion in America. It was therefore a battle of giants when Croke and Riordan met at Forty-five. They were well matched, and so evenly balanced was the fray, that after four nights of play they reckoned up the amount of money won and lost, to

illuminated address recording the meeting of the League of the Cross at Thurles. The Archbishop, as becomes an athlete, is a strong and sturdy advocate of temperance. He confirms no child in the Diocese of Cashel who does not take a solemn pledge not to touch, taste, or handle the accursed thing in the shape of alcohol. But although in this respect His Grace is a temperance man after Cardinal Manning's own heart, he is too much of an Irishman of the old school to frown at the mixing of a glass of hot punch after dinner, or to enforce the strict teetotalism which Cardinal Manning regarded as one of the first of the Christian virtues. A genial man he is, charming in society, a delightful host, a teller of good stories, and one who, on occasion, does not shrink from singing a

discover that the balance either way was only 1s. 6d., an average of 43d. a night.

Canon Liddon used sometimes to lament that he had been born too late in the century to have an opportunity of learning to ride the bicycle. Dr. Croke, in spite of his three score years and ten, is quite capable of taking to cycling with the zeal and zest of a young man. At present, however, his only cycling experience dates back nearly thirty or forty years. In the very early days of the wheel he enjoyed a run on a tricycle in the Bois de Boulogne. He is more at home, however, in the saddle than on the wheel. He is not given to hunting, although, like every Irishman, he has ridden to hounds, but most of his riding has been done in the discharge of his episcopal duties. When appointed Bishop of New

Zealand he almost lived on horseback, and to this day he praises with delight the easy-going lope of his New Zealand steeds. On one occasion he rode seventy-seven miles in ten hours on one horse, without stopping to bait his horse on the way. An occasional drink of water and a snack of grass was all the creature had between start and finish. When he reached his journey's end, the stableman simply removed the saddle and bridle, and giving the horse a kick in the ribs, sent it out to fend for itself in an adjacent pasture.

Nowadays, owing to the perfect liberty which was conceded them ever since Catholic emancipation, and the opportunities afforded by scholarships and the like for capable students to secure an almost costless education at Maynooth, there is very little inducement to the Irish youth to seek education in Belgium or in Italy. Every student in the Irish College at Rome must pay £45 a year for his education, and subsidiary expenses of travelling and the like, double this sum. The climate of Rome also is prejudicial to the health of many of the Irish, and only recently one of the most promising students fell a prey to one of the maladies of that southern climate. At St. Patrick's College, Thurles, the life is freer and more healthy than in the foreign colleges, and the curriculum is quite as liberal and the educational tests quite as searching.

II. THE IRISHMAN ABROAD.

It is a notable fact that Archbishop Croke, the most typical of all Irishmen, has spent no small fraction of his time abroad. The son of a Protestant mother, he was early in life taken in hand by a Catholic uncle, and brought up in the faith of the Catholic Church in Charleville, in Cork. But before he was out of his teens he was sent abroad to France to be educated for the priesthood, and for several years he first studied and then taught in the various colleges with which Irish piety has studded the Continent. It may be true, what Dr. Croke lamented to me in talking over the educational resources at the command of the Irish Catholics, that these colleges of Douay and Paris and Louvain and Rome come very far from realising the ideal with which they were founded; nevertheless they do give the Irish priesthood a tincture of cosmopolitanism which is impossible to those reared in the hothouse of Maynooth. The centenary of Maynooth was celebrated in July amid a great assemblage of the Catholic hierarchy from all parts of the world whither the Irish race has wandered. But it is overgrown and bloated, for the six hundred and fifty students now receiving education within its walls form far too large a number to be trained with that personal and individual care which is regarded as the distinctive glory of Catholic seminaries. But if Maynooth is far too big, the foreign colleges are too small, and too little is done to develop their latent possibilities for good. The Irish College in Paris is said to be dominated by a dread that the gay capital of France may contaminate the virginal purity of the young collegiates, who are accordingly mewed up in the college as in a bandbox, and who leave France at the end of their curriculum almost as ignorant of France and the French as if they had never entered the country. In Rome also, where Dr. Kelly has succeeded Monseigneur Kirby in the rectorship of the Irish College, the students are kept far too much by themselves, and have few opportunities of wandering at will through the streets of the Eternal City, whose atmosphere contains history in solution, and whose streets are as the storied pages of the annals of the Church. Everything tends to provincialise the Irish. The old days of persecution, when the Irish had to educate their priests abroad, tended continually to immerse their clergy in the wider and more cosmopolitan influence of the Continent.

Archbishop Croke gave me some particulars as to the ordinary course of a priest's education. Before he can be ordained a Catholic aspirant to the priesthood, he must first of all be sufficiently proficient in Latin and Greek to pass his entrance examination. At St. Patrick's College, Thurles, where the whole of this preliminary education is undertaken, it is found by experience that no one can be prepared for his entrance examination in less than two years at the shortest, and this period is sometimes in the case of slower pupils extended to four. After the entrance examination is past, the student has to spend two years in studying philosophy and four in theology. If his preliminary period of education is averaged at three years, the ordinary course of an Irish priest's education lasts nine years, during the last six of which he is educated with a single eye to a proficient discharge of the duties of the priesthood. The total cost of this education can hardly be estimated at less than £500 per head. This sum is borne for the most part by the parents of the lads. It is an object of family pride in Scotland, no less than in Ireland, to have a son in holy orders. The students for the most part come from the families of solid men, well-to-do farmers and tradesmen who can afford to pay the fees, and who desire to have a son in the Church. Discipline is administered with an iron hand in the colleges, and any student who is discovered by his teachers not to have a vocation is liable to be cashiered summarily without cause or sign other than the belief of his spiritual superiors that he has not a vocation. In these theological seminaries and in Maynooth the real teachers of the Irish people are trained. Their morality is high, much higher than that which prevails in Eton and Harrow and other public schools in our country, which are regarded by the Catholics familiar with the more austere rules of their own seminaries as little better than modern variants upon the cities of the plain.

Dr. Croke was educated first in France, from whence he was brought back to Ireland by the death of his brother, an event which is fixed in the Archbishop's memory by the recollection of meeting the wraith or

phantom of his deceased brother the first night in which he slept in the chamber in which the body had laid.

After this we again find him outside Ireland, as a Professor of Rhetoric at the Carlow College, from whence he was shortly afterwards promoted to the Irish College at Rome. Notwithstanding the fulfilment of these important functions abroad, he passed through every grade of ecclesiastical hierarchy. There is no post in the Catholic Church, from a curate to an archbishop, that he has not filled. He has been curate, parish priest, administrator, dean, bishop and archbishop, discharging in the meantime many duties more educational than ecclesiastical. His most important office before his selection as Archbishop of Cashel, was the Bishopric of New Zealand. Cardinal Cullen selected him, and sent him out, having well justified confidence in the energy and administrative capacity of the stalwart Irishman. His headquarters were at Auckland, and his commission was to clear the debt off the cathedral, and establish the Catholic organisation in that colony on a business-like basis.

Dr. Croke is enthusiastic about New Zealand. He thinks it is the finest country on the face of the globe; the best to live in, the best to work in, and the best to enjoy life in. The climate seems to him to be perfection, the general education and intelligence which prevail among the colonists higher than that in any other colony. Nothing could be more enthusiastic than the description given by Dr. Croke of his old diocese. He attributes the superiority of the colony largely to the fact that the Maori wars necessitated a considerable influx of British officers, who, when they had done their fighting, elected to settle down on land grants. Whatever the

Croke, "from one end of the island to the other, and never had to pay an hotel bill or my railway fare. Free passes everywhere on the lines, free board and lodging wherever you go-that is something like hospitality, and that is the hospitality which is practised in New Zealand. Only on one occasion was I sharply reminded of the sectarian intolerance which does so much harm at home. A Presbyterian minister who had been preaching against the Church of Rome found himself with me when I was making a journey some miles up country. When I got out at the railway station I found that my friends had sent a carriage for me to convey me to the town, which was situated about a mile away. The Presbyterian minister had also alighted at the same station. The rain was coming down in a perfect deluge. I went up to my Presbyterian friend and told him that there was plenty of room in the carriage, and hoped that he It

would accept a seat.

would not do, however; he would have no truck with the representative of the Pope of Rome, and, declining my invitation, he walked off sturdily in the pouring rain, which must have drenched him to the skin. That was almost the only instance of intolerance which I noted in the colony."

"I think," replied Dr. Croke, "that the New Zealand system is fairly satisfactory. The State provides an education solely secular, and ministers of all denominations are authorized to impart religious instruction to their pupils one day in the week. The Catholic priests in New Zealand attend regularly for some hours in the week to catechise the Catholic scholars in the public schools. The system seems to work admirably.

cause, he believed that New Zealand would soon be recognised as the brightest jewel in our Imperial diadem, and he noted with keen delight the success which had attended the bold initiative taken by New Zealand in the enfranchisement of women. Throughout the Australian colonies, including New Zealand, the Catholics are everywhere the second denomination. Numerically they are one in four in New South Wales, where they are the strongest, to one in seven in Western Australia and Queensland, where they are the weakest. The most respectable colonists everywhere in Australia, regarded from the conventional view of respectability, are the Anglicans. For the most part the colonists are extremely tolerant, and the relations between the various churches leave nothing to be desired. Here and there no doubt you may find an extreme sectarian, but for the most part nothing can exceed the generosity and liberality of the colonists in dealing with ministers of religion. "I travelled," said Dr.

III.-BISHOP AND ARCHBISHOP.

Dr. Croke was ordained bishop twenty-five years ago on July 24th. He became Bishop of New Zealand in the summer of 1870, about the time that the long threatened war between France and Germany was breaking out in Western Europe. He remained in New Zealand four years. Having cleared the debt off the cathedral and established the Catholic organisation in the colony, he returned to Ireland. Just twenty years had elapsed since he despaired of the Irish national cause. In his hot youth Archbishop Croke had imbibed that passionate enthusiasm for Irish nationality which is characteristic of his race. When the revolutionary movement of 1848 seemed to give hopes of a successful rising against the power of England, there were few who rejoiced more at the prospect than Dr. Croke. But he

was fortunately saved from any act of participation in the revolutionary movement. He became a leading member of the party of organised opposition, a party which in some sense may be regarded as the progenitor of the Irish Parliamentary party which we have to-day. That party limited its programme to the "three Fs". fair rent, free sale, and fixity of tenure. When Sir Charles Gavan Duffy left Ireland in 1856, it seemed to Dr. Croke that the last hope of obtaining anything for the Irish people had been dashed to the earth. He washed his hands of politics and stood aloof, doing his ecclesiastical work, caring not how the factions might brawl, and disdaining to waste any strength of body or of mind upon work which seemed to him to be as useless as the ploughing of the sands of the sea shore. This mood of apathetic indifference, not unmixed with a certain scornful laughter at the vanity of human expectations and the fatuity of the Irish Nationalist aspirations, did not last long after his return from the Antipodes.

The diocese of Cashel fell vacant, and Cardinal Cullen, who loved the stalwart Croke as if he had been his own son, coveted for the Church the appointment of such a man for such a central see. The clergy, as is their wont according to Catholic usage, met and selected three men, whose names they submitted to the Pope as eligible candidates for the vacant see. The first was dignissimus, the second dignior, and the third dignus, and none of them were selected to occupy the archiepiscopal throne of Cashel. The new cathedral was approaching completion, and the diocese was one of the most famous, if not the most famous, in Ireland. Close to the cathedral were conventual and monastic establishments and the famous College of St. Patrick, one of the missionary colleges of the Irish race from whose halls have gone forth priests equipped for waging the war of the cross in the uttermost parts of the earth. It was at Thurles, where, for the first time in the history of the Irish Church since the days of the Reformation, the Catholic synod had assembled. Alike from its geographical position, its political importance and its traditional associations, it was necessary that the holder of the archiepiscopal see at Cashel should in every respect be a man, a strong man who would be capable of reviving the discipline and restoring the efficiency of the Catholic Church in the somewhat stubborn and difficult county of Tipperary. When Cardinal Cullen received the names of the three, he, by a bold stroke of the authority with which he was invested, venture to blot out all three recommendations and to nominate Dr. Croke. There was some murmuring on the part of the clergy who found themselves so summarily set on one side; but in those days Cardinal Cullen was a kind of vice-Pope, and no one in Ireland ventured to dispute his imperious will.

IV. THE PATRIOT LAND-LEAGUER. The times were at hand when the world had need of such a man. The failure of the crops in 1879, and the prospect of privation, not to say starvation, which this brought upon the Irish peasant, thrilled as a trumpet call to the manhood of Ireland. At first Archbishop Croke, who for twenty-three years had preserved an attitude of indifference to the struggles of Irish parties, found himself strongly attracted to a movement which had as its objective the assertion of the right of the Irish people to the Irish land. Michael Davitt first raised the fiery cross and traversed the country from end to end, preaching the doctrines on which the Land League was founded. Nothing could have appealed more forcibly

to the sympathies of Archbishop Croke. The Land for the People was a watchword which roused his enthusiasm, while the spectacle of the people rising in their thousands from Donegal to the Cove of Cork to assert their right to the land could not fail to have his enthusiastic support. Mr. Parnell was some time before he followed where Michael Davitt had led. At last the evidence was too strong to be resisted that the Irish people had at last roused themselves from the lethargy into which they had fallen since 1848, and then Mr. Parnell made his plunge. Mr. Parnell was a Protestant-a cool, somewhat cynical, iron-handed man; but he understood Ireland, and had the initiative of genius. The moment, therefore, that he decided to throw in his lot with the Land Leaguers, he hurried over to Thurles and implored the Archbishop to join the cause. But Dr. Croke was loath to resume the position which he had abandoned long before, and hung back for a time. The more he hesitated, the more vehement Mr. Parnell pleaded for his support, until at last, Charles Stuart Parnell, the cool, unimpassioned Protestant landlord, actually flung himself upon his knees before the Archbishop of Cashel, and implored him to give his countenance to the cause of the Land League. "It is going to be a big thing," he added, " and I must have the clergy in it." It was a great scene which Thurles Palace witnessed that day, and one which perhaps an Irish Nationalist painter will commemorate some day. Mr. Parnell, a politician and leader of the Irish race, falling, Protestant though he was, at the feet of the Archbishop of Cashel, would make a very effective subject for a fresco on the walls of the Parliament House on College Green in which the first Home Rule Parliament assembled. The moment Dr. Croke decided to support the Land League, he flung himself heart and soul into the agitation.

During the next two or three years he was one of the most conspicuous figures, if not the most conspicuous, in Ireland. Mr. Forster stood out, of course, rugged and stern, as the representative of the English garrison at the Castle. Mr. Parnell and his henchmen laboured indefatigably, now in Ireland, and then at Westminster; but the heroic figure on Irish soil was the Archbishop of Cashel, who made Thurles the central citadel of the Irish Land League. At one time Mr. Forster, impatient at the failure of one of his schemes, wished to arrest Father Cantwell, the administrator of the diocese, who throughout these troubles had acted as Archbishop Croke's right-hand man and chief-of-staff in the national movement. Mr. Forster's fingers itched to clap Father Cantwell into Kilmainham; but he desisted, knowing full well that the arrest of the administrator would have to be followed by that of Archbishop Croke. From that even Mr. Forster recoiled. Therein he was wise; nor had he long to wait for his reward.

After the Land Act was passed, and it was evident that it would be suppressed and its leaders clapped into gaol, Mr. Parnell, Mr. Dillon, and others prepared a No Rent manifesto, which was to be launched as their reply to the administrative decree which landed them in Kilmainham. It was a policy of despair, and a policy, moreover, which had not the justification of being politic as a set-off against its immorality. Against the No Rent manifesto Archbishop Croke set his face as a flint. It seemed to the Archbishop, as to many others, that the No Rent manifesto was illogical. The true reply to the action of the Government was to have refused to have paid taxes rather than to repudiate the debts which were owed to a number of individuals who were in no way responsible for the action of the

Government, with which, indeed, they had been almost openly at war.

Notwithstanding all these considerations, no sooner had Mr. Parnell been placed in Kilmainham Gaol than the No Rent manifesto appeared. Father Cantwell presided over the last meeting of the Land League before its suppression. Father Ryan, now Canon Ryan, one of the Archbishop's most devoted priests, attended at the last meeting in Dublin, and declared in words not less true than eloquent that Governments might crush the Land League and suppress every political organisation that the Irish people might improvise, but that behind all these secular associations stood eternal and indestructible the great ecclesiastical organisation of the patriot bishops and clergy of Ireland. The Irish National Movement was founded, as it were, upon the bed-rock of St. Peter, and against it all the force of English fury would be spent in vain. Hurrying back to Thurles, Father Cantwell and Father Ryan found the Archbishop ill in bed. Hearing what had happened, he asked for pen and writing materials, and there from his sick bed he issued his famous manifesto denouncing the policy of No Rent, and shattering, as it were, by an ecclesiastical thunderbolt, the immoral and unjustifiable policy against which he had protested in vain.

He felt when he had signed the manifesto that he had definitely effaced himself from the Irish National Movement; but in this he was mistaken. Impulsive and passionate, and sorely tried as were the Irishmen at that time, there are few who do not to-day recognise that Archbishop Croke, in denouncing the No Rent manifesto, was more true to the best interests of his country than were the desperate men who in the hour of frenzy raised the cry of No Rent.

His next appearance in the political arena was much more congenial. Recognising the immense services which Mr. Parnell had rendered to the Irish peasants and to the Irish nation, Archbishop Croke wrote a letter in which he suggested the raising of a fund as a testimonial to the young Irish leader as a tribute from a grateful nation to its heroic chief. The proposal was warmly taken up. But by this time the mind of the Pope had been pretty well poisoned against the National Movement in Ireland. From his palace-prison of the Vatican Pope Leo endeavours to the best of his ability to survey the distant lands which form part of the patrimony of St. Peter. Unfortunately Pope Leo found, like many of his predecessors, that

one time were summoned to Rome. They sat in council under the presidency of a cardinal, and endeavoured to the best of their poor ability to afford good guidance to the Pope and his entourage. They found, however, that their efforts were in vain. The mists which Newman declared in a well-known passage lurked round the basis of the rock on which St. Peter had founded his throne defeated all their efforts. Limbs of Satax in the person of Under Secretaries of State, to whom the Irish were merely rebels, blocked up all avenues through which words of wisdom might have penetrated to the pontifical ear. As a result, when the Archbishop of Cashel found himself face to face with the Pope, there was a fine to-do. On the one side a cultured and aged Italian full of finesse, subtle sword play, and courtly diplomacy, and on the other, a sturdy, resolute, typical representative of the Irish race.

Archbishop Croke was no courtier. On one occasion he scandalised the Court chamberlains almost out of their wits by accepting the twice repeated invitation of Cardinal Antonelli to take a seat on the couch, leaving to the Cardinal the chair. This was a fearful breach of etiquette, which provides that the sofa shall he occupied by the superior and the chair by the inferior. On another occasion, when the Archbishop was to have an audience with the Pope, the carriage which had been ordered did not arrive; nothing loath, he clambered into an ordinary hackney coach in all his episcopal magnificence, and was driven through the streets of Rome, to the no small scandal of the clergy and the amusement of the populace.

No report has ever been published of the conversation - the fierce debate it would perhaps be better to call it-which took place between the Pope and the Archbishop. Here at least they were on an equal footing, for whatever advantage the Pope might claim by his ecclesiastical position was more than overbalanced by the Archbishop's superiority of local knowledge and the absolute certainty with which he was able to speak on many questions which to the Pope were vague and dim. Neither Pope nor Archbishop would yield one inch. From beginning to end the Irish prelate held his ground, dealing many a weighty blow at his formidable antagonist, who at last closed the interview by saying testily that it was no use talking; he had issued his orders-a remark which could only have one meaning. The Archbishop was quick to recognise that the bolt was launched. "When the Pope of Rome issues his orders, the Are Cashel will be the first to obey;" and so the audience chamber, after an intervie

it was impossible for him to see the land of St. Patrick excepting through spectacles manufactured on this side of St. George's Channel. Sixteen Bishops from Ireland at