If Ireland had not lost the Gaelic she never would have had this sensitiveness as of a _parvenu_ when presented at Court for the first time, or of a nigger newspaper. When Ireland had the confidence of her own antiquity, her writers praised and blamed according to their fancy, and even as throughout all mediæval Europe, they laughed when they had a mind to at the most respected persons, at the sanctities of Church and State. The story of _The Shadow of the Glen_, found by Mr. Synge in Gaelic-speaking Aran, and by Mr. Curtain in Munster; the Song of _The Red-haired Man’s Wife_, sung in all Gaelic Ireland; _The Midnight Court of MacGiolla Meidhre_; _The Vision of MacCoinglinne_; the old romancers, with their Bricriu and their Conan, laughed and sang as fearlessly as Chaucer or Villon or Cervantes. It seemed almost as if those old writers murmured to themselves: ‘If we but keep our courage let all the virtues perish, for we can make them over again; but if that be gone, all is gone.’ I remember when I was an art student at the Metropolitan School of Art a good many years ago, saying to Mr. Hughes the sculptor, as we looked at the work of our fellow-students, ‘Every student here that is doing better work than another is doing it because he has a more intrepid imagination; one has only to look at the line of a drawing to see that’; and he said that was his own thought also. All good art is extravagant, vehement, impetuous, shaking the dust of time from its feet, as it were, and beating against the walls of the world.