Where now, we sadly ask, is the Ireland of Tom Moore, Father Prout, Lover and Lever? Not enough left of it to furnish a new drama for Mr. Boucicault. Donnybrook Fair has given place to midnight conspirations. Fox-hunts to the stalking of landlords--all the jolly old customs extinct, except the "wake." Peasant-life, over there, sometimes seems, at the best, one protracted "wake." I suppose it is too late now, yet I can but think that if the Queen had built years ago, a palace in Ireland, at Killarney, or in lovely Wicklow, or in Dublin itself, and resided there a part of every year, things might have been better. She was so popular in that "distressful country" when, by frequent visits, she testified an interest in it, and her gentle, motherly presence might have had a more placating influence than any "Coercion bill." The money she would have spent there,--the very crumbs that would have fallen from her table, would have been a benefaction to that poor people. The Fenian drama had its ghastly closing _tableau_ in the hanging of the ringleaders, and the explosion at Clerkenwell. The hanging of those Fenians must have been about the last of that sort of a public entertainment, as a law was soon passed making all future executions strictly private. Among a certain class of Her Majesty's subjects this was a most unpopular measure. Pot-house politicians and gin-palace courtiers, both ladies and gentlemen, discussed it hotly and denounced it sternly, as an infringement on the sacred immemorial rights of British freemen and a blow to the British Constitution. In 1874 Mr. Disraeli had become Prime Minister. He died in 1880--Lord Beaconsfield, sincerely lamented by the Queen, who was much attached to him as a friend, and greatly admired him as a man of genius. He was a brilliant novelist and a famous statesman; but the best things I know of him are the tender love and manly gratitude he always testified towards his devoted wife, and his pathetic mourning for her loss. He might have adopted for her tombstone the quaint, terse epitaph of an American husband--"Think what a wife should be, and she was that." Through his means, the title of "Empress of India" was conferred on the Queen by act of Parliament. Some English people opposed it as superfluous, a sort of anti-climax of dignity, as "gilding the refined gold" of English Sovereignty with baser metal, as "painting the lily" of the noblest of English royal titles with India-ink; but it did no harm. It did not hurt the Radicals and it pleased the Rajahs.