is not sufficiently emphasised, and that he must therefore take rank as a poet of society upon whom the eternal problems did not press heavily enough to make him a poet-philosopher. The indictment may indeed be partially true; but there is poetry which has as little of the character of a profound philosophy as have the cravings of the human heart. “The Meeting of the Waters” or “She is far from the land,” though unweighted by any profound or subtle thought, will outlive--to venture on prediction--the splendid unravelling of intellectual complexities in “Mr. Sludge, the Medium.” There is not, I believe, to be found in any literature more melodious utterance of real emotion than in the songs of this true poetic brother of Oliver Goldsmith--like him, and unlike many of his contemporaries, possessed of “the great poetic heart,” the possession of which, we have been told, is “more than all poetic fame.” The charm, as I have already observed, of the greater part of the poetry and prose of Ireland, lies in its unaffected purity and naturalness. The lyrical cry we hear in the music-marvels--“I saw from the beach” and “Oft in the stilly night”--has a piercing sweetness unrivalled by greater poets of vastly wider range. For the creator of a nation’s songs there is little need to fear, despite the critics, the verdict, in a phrase of Archer Butler’s, of “the incorruptible Areopagus of posterity.” [Illustration: “THE BURIAL OF SIR JOHN MOORE.” FAC-SIMILE FROM ORIGINAL LETTER IN THE LIBRARY OF THE ROYAL IRISH ACADEMY. (_By Permission._)] [Illustration: (second page)] Yet other members of the Historical Society were found among the leaders of the revolutionary party in the troublous times of the Irish Rebellion. Wolfe Tone, the leader of the United Irishmen, had sat in the chair of the Society, obtained three of its medals, and delivered the closing address of one of the sessions. His place in history has been accurately defined by a brilliant young Irish University man of the present generation, Mr. T. W. Rolleston: “He found national sentiment the property of a small aristocratic section; he left it the dominant sentiment of the millions of the Irish democracy.” The author of “A Battle of Freedom,” Thomas Davis, may rightly be called the Tyrtæus of the national party. He too held the premier office, that of Auditor, in the Society above mentioned, and might, had he lived, have reached a high place, not only among Irish but among English poets. Dublin claims many other names of literary note--Sir Samuel Ferguson, recently lost to us, whose themes were the ancient traditions and legends of his native land; and (to go a generation further back) that poet who has earned the laurel by adding to the treasury of literature one poem not to be forgotten--“The Burial of Sir John Moore.” (_See fac-simile_, pp. 260, 261.)