People will sometimes say that religious conversion effects a change of heart. I very much doubt it. Under religion people remain what they were before only they are more so. The influence of Wesley reached the middle and lower classes among the English; & commercial before, they became more commercial. The commercial instinct of selfishness was able henceforth to call itself a duty, and took on religious airs; and a large part of the religion of Belfast may be stated in a single sentence 'The man who sells his cow too cheap goes to Hell.' But when Wesleyism affected the Irish leisured class, gentlemen before, they remained gentlemen, only with more refinement of heart and a more subtle sympathy. The wild men, described by Charles Lever, who cared for nothing except romance and courage and personal glory, now walked in the footsteps of their Lord and Master. In my youth I would sometimes hear people say with self-complacency that there was no gentleman the equal of an Irish gentleman. The boast was not altogether foolish. We all know the type of Christian and Saint who has no manners. These men had manners and cultivated them as part and parcel of the Christian ideal. Back in the misty past I can see those quiet figures of a now forgotten civilisation, whose gentility differed from that of the English as light from darkness, and one especially, Sir Andrew Hart, who was Vice-Provost of Trinity College Dublin, and a learned mathematician. I painted his portrait, and one day, as I looked at him and admired his proud and distinguished profile, I said 'Sir Andrew, I am sure nature intended you to have been the leader of a tribe of insurgents in the Caucasus.' His laugh did not repudiate the suggestion. Yet he had the gentlest manners, imposing restraint on others by the restraint he imposed on himself. My father sometimes said that if a man is rude to you it is always your own fault, and I remember a bumptious man from Belfast, a cousin of my own, who would complain that he could not get men to be civil to him. Sir Andrew was a man singularly handsome, very tall, with great strength and endurance. He told me that on the night of the great storm of 1839 he walked thirty miles, the weather being so dreadful that no one would lend him a horse. He lived to be over eighty years of age, and his daughter-in-law told me that he died because of some inadvertence, some chance neglect. There are men who ought to live to be as old as Methuselah. It is some accident, some chance of a window left open or a window kept shut, that makes inevitable the shears of Clotho.