is so—­and who upon the Irish side of the channel can wholly and absolutely deny the assertion?—­then our one poor standing-point is plucked from under our feet, and we are all abroad upon the waves again.  Will Home Rule or would Home Rule, it has been asked, recognize this fact as one of the immutable ones, or would it sooner or later incline to think that with a little determination, a little manipulation, the so-called fact would politely cease to be a fact at all?  It is difficult to say, and until an answer is definitely received it does not perhaps argue any specially sloth-like clinging to the known in preference to the unknown to admit that there is for ordinary minds some slight craning at the fence, some not altogether unnatural alarm as to the ground that is to be found on the other side of it.  “Well, how do you feel about Home Rule now that it seems to be really coming?” some one inquired last spring, of an humble but life-long Nationalist. “’Deed, sir, to tell the truth, I feel as if I’d been calling for the moon all me life and was told it was coming down this evening into me back garden!” was the answer.  It is not until a great change is actually on top of us, till the gulf yawns big and black under our very eyes, that we fully realize what it means or what it may come to mean.  The old state of things, we then begin to say to ourselves, was really very inconvenient, very trying to all our tempers and patience, but at least we know the worst of it.  Of the untravelled future we know nothing.  It fronts us, with hands folded, smiling blankly.  It may be a great deal better than we expect, but, on the other hand, it may be worse, and in ways, too, which as yet we hardly foresee.  Whatever else Home Rule may, would, could, or should be, one thing friends and foes alike may agree to admit, and that is that it will mark an entirely new departure—­a departure so new that no illustration drawn from the last century, or from any other historical period, is of much avail in enabling us to picture it to ourselves.  It will be no resumption, no mere continuation of anything that has gone before, but a perfectly fresh beginning.  A beginning, it may be asked, of what?

LIX.

CONCLUSION.

“Concluded not completed,” is the verdict of Carlyle upon one of his earlier studies, and “concluded not completed,” conscience is certainly apt to mutter at the close of so necessarily inadequate a summary as this.  Much of this inadequacy, it may fairly be confessed, is individual, yet a certain amount is also inherent in the very nature of the task itself.  In no respect does this inadequacy press with a more penitential weight than in the case of those heroes whose names spring up at intervals along our pages, but which are hardly named before the grim necessities of the case force us onwards, and the hero and his doings are left behind.