But, forsooth, it is a matter of wonder that I should have felt doubtful whether the Irish Church would be dealt with in my time. Now, I do not complain of this. It is an example of what is continually happening in human affairs, of the mythical handling of facts, of the reflection of the ideas, feelings, and circumstances of one period upon the events of another, and thus dressing the past in the garb of the present. I abide by this, and by every word of the letter. The question of the Irish Church was in my view, in the year 1865, what, be it remembered, the question of Parliamentary Reform seemed to be in the first moiety of the year 1830--namely, a remote question. Had any man said to me, "How soon will it come on?" I should have replied, "Heaven knows; perhaps it will be five years, perhaps it will be ten." My duty was to let my constituents know the state of my mind on a matter so important, because the wind was gradually veering to that quarter, even though I might not believe, and did not believe it to be the most probable event, that it would reach the point for action during the life of the Parliament just then about to be elected. But then I referred to my own political lifetime. On that subject I will only say that a man who, in 1865, completed his thirty-third year of a laborious career; who had already followed to the grave the remains of almost all the friends abreast of whom he had started from the University in the career of public life; and who had observed that, excepting two recent cases, it was hard to find in our whole history a single man who had been permitted to reach the fortieth year of a course of labour similar to his own within the walls of the House of Commons; such a man might surely be excused if he did not venture to reckon for himself on an exemption from the lot of greater and better men, and if he formed a less sanguine estimate of the fraction of space yet remaining to him, than seems to have been the case with his critics. The reasons that, in my judgment, prove the time now to have arrived for dealing decisively with the question of the Irish Church Establishment, must be treated elsewhere than in these pages. So far as Ireland, and the immediate controversy, and my personal vindication are concerned, I have done. But there is matter of wider interest, which connects itself with the subject. The change of conduct, the shifting of the mind of an individual, shrink into insignificance by the side of the question, What has been, since 1838, the direction of the public sentiment, the course of law and administration, the general march of affairs?