patient in sorrow, passionate against wrong, dutiful to humanity, hopeful amid the confusions and losses of our troubled and changeful time? Of what sort are its moral energies? Has it any? Can it reform the bad, inspire the feeble and fallible with enthusiasm for virtue, make the stern tender, the harsh gentle, the ignoble and false magnanimous and true? David Strauss, speaking of Julian's attempt to restore heathenism, has well said: "Only a book scholar (the cloistered student, victim of his own fancies) could imagine that a phantom, woven of poetry, philosophy, and superstition, could occupy the place of real religion."* And is not the saying as true of the modern Agnostic as of the ancient Neo-Platonist? I confess to a secret regard for the Religion of Humanity. It has moral passion and purpose in it, is capable of creating and directing enthusiasm for the rights and liberties and against the wrongs and oppressions of man. But this religion of Agnosticism, this humiliation of the reason before a blank abstraction, created by thought to paralyze thought, is but an insult to the spirit, an insolent yet feeble mockery of the hopes, the loves, the ideals, the inspiration, the consolations, and reverences, that have been at once symbolized for our race and realized in it by the grand old thing named Religion.

A. M. FAIRBAIRN.

"Der Romantiker auf dem Throne der Cäsaren," p. 12.

"THEY WERE A GREAT PEOPLE, SIR."

A CONTRIBUTION TO SOME VEXED QUESTIONS IN IRELAND.

A

NY person leaving Euston Station at 8.25 P.M., and travelling by Irish Express Service, vid Holyhead, Kingstown, and Dublin, may find himself at twelve noon on the following day at a railway junction in the centre of the South of Ireland, some 430 miles from London. Changing trains at this junction, he will reach Limerick an hour later, where a second and final change will place him in a carriage marked "Ennis."

After a certain lapse of time, his new train, moving out from Limerick station, will run slowly through some rich low-lying meadows-will run slower still across a bridge spanning a large full-fed river flowing towards the West, and finally will achieve the slowest measure of railroad progression as it puffs and blows up the steep grades that lead from "Shannon's Shore" to the high level of the Cratloe Hills in Clare.

And now, as stations come and go along the line of railway, the traveller, apart from a keen enjoyment of bits of rare landscape beauty intermixed with bare brown stretches of bog and treeless waste, will become conscious of a new sensation. He will find himself in a world where time has no value, where punctuality is a precept recognized only in its incessant infraction, and where "rail-roading" as it is termed in America-is a business completely divested of those characteristics of bustle, speed, energy, and animated human effort which are usually associated with its practice throughout the world. We will take one station on the line as a sample of the routine of traffic more observable at all.

or less

With many sudden jerks, and harsh sounds of iron in contact with iron, the train comes to a stop-a lazy-looking porter walks along the platform shouting the name of the station in a deep, rich patois-the guard and the station-master greet each other after the manner of

friends who have not met for years, and may not meet again for life. Apparently overcome by emotion, they retire into the recesses of the station-house. A man comes along with a grease-box for the wheels'; he is about to proceed with his avocation when, recognizing a friend in the middle of a third-class compartment, he lays down his box, suspends all lubricating effort, and devotes himself to a prolonged shaking of hands through the carriage-windows, his "How are ye, Mickey?" being borne in tones of genuine welcome along the train. Nobody appears to be getting in or out, nor does there seem to be any reason whatever-mail, baggage, or otherwise- why the train should have stopped, unless it was for the benefit of the two members of the Royal Irish Constabulary, the single car-driver, and the half-dozen idlers of both sexes, who stand on the platform, or the other half-dozen less privileged individuals who are looking over the station wall, blankly staring at the proceedings. The car-driver is near our carriage-window, and we engage him in conversation.

They stop a long time here," we remark.

"They do, yer honour-but the hill was agin her from Limerick up, and she do get hot over it," he replied.

"Is it all like this?" we ask.

"It's mostly the same up to Ardsollus," he answers, "but from Ardsollus down she gives great value entirely. But shure, it's better for her," he goes on, "to take her coorse aisy; last year she was on her time at Cratloe crossing-the gate was shut agin her-the porter's wife ran out to open it, and got killed."

Suddenly the station bell interrupts our conversation, the engine whistles, and we move off from the platform. Now ensues much confusion in the interior of the station. The guard rushes out followed by the station-master, the first-named official masters the position at once-a shout, and an impatient wave of the hand brings the train back again to the platform-this done, the guard turns fiercely upon some idle urchins who are standing in suspicious proximity to the station bell. "Which of yez," he demands, "was it stharted her?"

There is no reply.

"Ave I caught the one that gave her the bell, I'd--," here words fail him to express the vengeance he would wreak upon the delinquent ringer, the boys separate and run, the guard gives the final signal of departure, and we move slowly off at last, one hour and twenty minutes behind time.

Despite the value" given from Ardsollus down, a remunerative proceeding solely due to a steep down grade which "she" was utterly powerless to control, we are fully an hour late at Ennis station. To the people in the train, or to those out of it, the hour lost matters little, but with thirty long miles before us, ere the halting-place for the night is reached, the delay makes a serious difference.

There is a bright side, however, to the picture. If the rail-roading.

has been slow and bad-the car-driving is destined to be rapid and excellent. Our few traps are neatly and expeditiously packed "on the well," the driver takes his reins and the off-seat-touches the little brown mare with the whip, and we are soon outside Ennis, holding a steady pace of seven miles in the hour into the West. There are still four hours of good daylight before us, and we are only twenty hours out from London.

Only twenty hours of time, yet an age of scene and surrounding. It is midsummer-the blue-grey limestone road stretches away over hill and dale dustless, grass-bordered, and silent. On the ditches, over the fields, and up the rounded hills the grass is green as only Irish grass can be-soft-green in the shadows, golden-green where the sun, now sinking slowly towards the west, touches it with slanting beam— many meadows are deep in yellow flagger lilies, the corn-crake is loud amid the tufts of meadow sweet, and the outline of the hills lies in wonderful clearness against the sky; there are dark patches of bog and lighter bits of heather scattered here and there, with acres of potatoes in blossom and fields of

"drooping oats

Through which the poppies show their scarlet coats."

Now and again, on either side of the road a solitary shattered tower stands out upon a bare hill-side, or rounded "rath," fringed with thorn bushes, is seen, and often the ivied gable of a roofless church rises near the roadside the ruined reminders of forgotten times.

After two hours driving we stop at the door of a roadside publichouse, on the white-washed wall of which a board informs the traveller that Fanny O'Dea is licensed to dispense spirits and entertainment for man and beast. The driver gives the mare "a white drink," takes a darker one himself, and then we go on again towards the west-the daylight of the long June evening still glorious over the land.

The driver has now become loquacious. He is loud in praise of the beauty of Mrs. O'Dea. He tells us that when he first knew her she "had a waist like the shaft of his car." He tells us, too, that he remembers the bad times, but that personally " he didn't get much of the famine." He informs us that the country through which we are passing, and the castles which we see rising up, grey ruined towers on the green slopes, "all belonged once to the MacMahons, that they held the land, far and near, from six miles on this side of Ennis to the rocks at Loop Head; that they were a great people, but that they are all gone from the land now."

"Where did they go to?" we ask. "Devil a one knows, yer honour.

It's likely they hanged some,

and transported more, and maybe them that was neither hanged nor transported drank themselves out-anyways they're gone out of it this many a day."

"And who's in their place now?" we inquire.

S

"There's many a one," he replies; "there's S-, and S. and and a lot more."

The road now begins to ascend a long incline: we alight to walk the hill. Before we are half-way to the top the driver has forgotten the MacMahons, and is enlightening us as to how it was he had never got married, "though there was a girl of the Malonys," he says, "about two miles off the road on the left, that was even then breaking her heart for him."

At last we are on the top of the hill. Below-at the further sidethe land spreads out in many a mile of shore, ridge, and valley into the golden haze of sunset. The estuary of the Shannon opens westward into the Atlantic; from shore to shore many miles of water are gleaming in the evening light. A large green island lies in the estuary, and from its centre a lofty round tower rises above many ruins-dark in the sunlight: back from the shore rolling ridges spread westward, green, wild, and treeless. These ridges, this long line of shore far as eye can reach in front, was all MacMahon territory; behind us, farther than we can look back, was MacMahon's land too.

So much for the scene, as it presented itself to us on this summer's evening. Let us see if we can add something to the driver's " They were a great people, but they're all gone, root and branch, from the land now, sir."

To do so we must go back a long way. Among the many Celtic names in the early history of Ireland from which the English reader turns in perplexed indifference, there is one which seems to have caught in more lasting cadence the modern memory. It is that of Brian Boru-Brian of the Tribute.

This favourite hero of Celtic bard and historian fell fighting, as everybody knows, or ought to know, on the field of Clontarf; or rather he was slain towards the end of the battle by some fugitive Danes, who found him praying in his tent-like Moses-for the success of his people. He was at this time eighty-eight years of age.

Many of his kith and kin perished in the same battle. His eldest son, Murrough, we are told, used his battle-axe with great effect upon the Danes, until his right hand and arm became so swollen that his blows were unable to deal death through the armour of his enemies. In this condition he was set upon by the Danish chief, Arnulf. Seizing his enemy with his left hand, Murrough first shook him out of his armour, and then killed him with his axe; but it is said that the Dane, in his last moment, snatched his opponent's knife from his belt, and plunged it into his side. Tordelback, or Turlough, son of Murrough, and grandson of Brian, also died hard that day. He was only a boy of sixteen, but despite his youth, the "Annals of Clonmacnoise" tell us that his body was found after the battle floating in the tideway of the Tolka river, with both his hands twisted in the hair of a Dane whom he had followed into the sea.