for the opposition to our School claimed him as its leader. When I was at Siena, I noticed that the Byzantine style persisted in faces of Madonnas for several generations after it had given way to a more natural style, in the less loved faces of saints and martyrs. Passion had grown accustomed to those sloping and narrow eyes, which are almost Japanese, and to those gaunt cheeks, and would have thought it sacrilege to change. We would not, it is likely, have found listeners if John O'Leary, the irreproachable patriot, had not supported us. It was as clear to him that a writer must not write badly, or ignore the examples of the great masters in the fancied or real service of a cause, as it was that he must not lie for it or grow hysterical. I believed in those days that a new intellectual life would begin, like that of Young Ireland, but more profound and personal, and that could we but get a few plain principles accepted, new poets and writers of prose would make an immortal music. I think I was more blind than Johnson, though I judge this from his poems rather than anything I remember of his talk, for he never talked ideas, but, as was common with his generation in Oxford, facts and immediate impressions from life. With others this renunciation was but a pose, a superficial reaction from the disordered abundance of the middle century, but with him it was the radical life. He was in all a traditionalist, gathering out of the past phrases, moods, attitudes, and disliking ideas less for their uncertainty than because they made the mind itself changing and restless. He measured the Irish tradition by another greater than itself, and was quick to feel any falling asunder of the two, yet at many moments they seemed but one in his imagination. Ireland, all through his poem of that name, speaks to him with the voice of the great poets, and in _Ireland Dead_ she is still mother of perfect heroism, but there doubt comes too. Can it be they do repent That they went, thy chivalry, Those sad ways magnificent? And in _Ways of War_, dedicated to John O'Leary, he dismissed the belief in an heroic Ireland as but a dream. A dream! a dream! an ancient dream! Yet ere peace come to Innisfail, Some weapons on some field must gleam, Some burning glory fire the Gael. That field may lie beneath the sun, Fair for the treading of an host: That field in realms of thought be won, And armed hands do their uttermost: Some way, to faithful Innisfail, Shall come the majesty and awe Of martial truth, that must prevail To lay on all the eternal law.