crew from the Dragon; further, that he was sorry to have to perform such a service; and that he had been credibly informed my father was a very good man. I answered I know not what."

Worthy and loquacious Captain Hall! At the Viceregal table that night he swore, no doubt, that the felon was, after all, not half a bad fellow, a gentleman too-but Irish, of course, Irish. The same shrewd humour is observable in the other portraits. There is, for example, the Captain of the Shearwater:

Captain Wingrove has good wine. He had just come from Madeira and Portugal, when he was ordered off to Bermuda, so that he had opportunities. He is evidently curious about late events in Ireland, but does not like to ask me much about them. Said he understood there was a practice in Ireland, in the law courts there, called packing juries, and asked what it meant. I explained it to him; but it is clear he hardly believes me; indeed he listens to everything I say with a kind of quiet smile and sometimes looks doubtfully at me, as if he thought me slightly insane, and expected me to break out in some strange manner."

Well do we, whose business it has sometimes been to explain such things to Englishmen, know that smile.

Lastly, there is the Captain of the Neptune, who after a vain attempt to buy two loaves of

bread in Capetown, returns to his ship declaring he had never met with such fools in his life.

"Our skipper belongs apparently to that numerous class of persons who cannot understand how sane men, Britons too, professing Christianity, and living in the nineteenth century, can bring themselves, on mere public grounds, to refuse to turn a penny. He is an old East-India captain, and knows a sure way, he tells me, to bring these people to reason namely, to give 'three dozen all round ' to the colonists, and a double allowance to the clergy."

One other thing must be said, because, though evident enough, it has been commonly ignored. The Jail Journal is not only one of the best, but also one of the best-tempered, of books. For all that he is continually denouncing "the Carthaginian Government " and its Irish agents, Mitchel -contrary to the received opinion-was very far from being "a good hater." Perhaps he did not even hate England as much as he himself supposed. English literature he assuredly did not hate, nor all English ways, nor the mass of English people. Them, indeed he considered as, almost equally with the inhabitants of Ireland or India, victims of what he calls (in that curious colloquy between himself and his " double-goer ") the Thing-that is the half-military, half-commercial system, compounded of bayonets, money, gin, false gentility and false

morality, which was the enemy of all alike. With such Englishmen as he was actually brought into contact-so long as they were neither stupid nor arrogant he got on famously. A very little kindness and courtesy left him disarmed.

"Sometimes I put myself to the question about it-How can I eat thus heartily of British convict rations? sleep thus calmly on a felon's iron bed? receive in gracious-wise the courtesies of Carthaginian gaolers, looking my black destiny so placidly in the face? By heaven! it cannot be that I am pigeon-livered, and lack gall to make oppression bitter. Go to I will lash myself into suitable rage. But it will not do. The next time old Dr. Hall comes in, with his grey hairs and good old weather beaten countenance, and begins to talk, my armour of sullen pride will fall to pieces: the human heart that, I suppose, is in me will know its brother, and I will find myself quietly conversing with that old man, as friend with friend."

Of some of his own countrymen he speaks with more bitterness-as again is characteristic, and perhaps natural; but his references to O'Connell, whose later policy he detested, have little of Lalor's

venom.

"Poor old Dan! wonderful, mighty, jovial and mean old man. . . . what a royal, yet vulgar, soul ! with the keen eye and potent swoop of a generous

eagle of Cairn Tual-with the base servility of a hound, and the cold cruelty of a spider. Think of his speech for John Magee, the most powerful forensic achievement since before Demosthenesand then think of the ' gorgeous and gossamer theory of moral and peaceful agitation, the most astounding organon of public swindling since man first bethought him of obtaining money under false pretences. And after one has thought of all this and more, what then can a man say? What but pray that Irish earth may lie light on O'Connell's breast-and that the good God who knows how to create so wondrous a creature may have mercy upon his soul."

One last quotation, and we have done.

A book ought to be like a man or a woman, with some individual character in it, though eccentric, yet its own; with some blood in its veins, and speculation in its eyes, and a way and a will of its own."

That test the Jail Journal can face.

C

CHAPTER VII.

HISTORIANS.

ARLETON, when setting to work on his Autobiography towards the end of his life, wrote to a friend :

"The only three names which Ireland can point to with pride are Griffin's, Banim's, and do not accuse me of vanity when I say my own. Banim and Griffin are gone, and I will soon follow, ultimus Romanorum; and after that will come a lull, an obscurity of perhaps half a century, when new conditions of civil society and a new phase of manners and habits among the people-for this is a transition stage-may introduce new fields and new tastes in other writers, for in this manner the cycles of literature and taste appear, hold their day, displace each other, and make room for others.

No one is indispensable: yet, so far as Carleton's own art of story-telling is concerned, Irish literature