would not allow him to take a brief, lest he should be selling his talents to defeat justice.  With keen logical powers, he had warm sympathies, solid judgment of character, thoughtful tenderness, and total self-abandonment.  He before long took Holy Orders, and became an indefatigable curate in the mountains of Wicklow.  Every evening he sallied forth to teach in the cabins, and roving far and wide over mountain and amid bogs, was seldom home before midnight.  By such exertions his strength was undermined, and he so suffered in his limbs that not lameness only, but yet more serious results were feared.  He did not fast on purpose, but his long walks through wild country and indigent people inflicted on him much severe deprivation:  moreover, as he ate whatever food offered itself,—­food unpalatable and often indigestible to him, his whole frame might have vied in emaciation with a monk of La Trappe.

Such a phenomenon intensely excited the poor Romanists, who looked on him as a genuine “saint” of the ancient breed.  The stamp of heaven seemed to them clear in a frame so wasted by austerity, so superior to worldly pomp, and so partaking in all their indigence.  That a dozen such men would have done more to convert all Ireland to Protestantism, than the whole apparatus of the Church Establishment, was ere long my conviction; though I was at first offended by his apparent affectation of a mean exterior.  But I soon understood, that in no other way could he gain equal access to the lower and lowest orders, and that he was moved not by asceticism, nor by ostentation, but by a self-abandonment fruitful of consequences.  He had practically given up all reading except that of the Bible; and no small part of his movement towards me soon took the form of dissuasion from all other voluntary study.

In fact, I had myself more and more concentrated my religious reading on this one book:  still, I could not help feeling the value of a cultivated mind.  Against this, my new eccentric friend, (himself having enjoyed no mean advantages of cultivation,) directed his keenest attacks.  I remember once saying to him, in defence of worldly station,—­“To desire to be rich is unchristian and absurd; but if I were the father of children, I should wish to be rich enough to secure them a good education.”  He replied:  “If I had children, I would as soon see them break stones on the road, as do any thing else, if only I could secure to them the Gospel and the grace of God.”  I was unable to say Amen, but I admired his unflinching consistency;—­for now, as always, all he said was based on texts aptly quoted and logically enforced.  He more and more made me ashamed of Political Economy and Moral Philosophy, and all Science; all of which ought to be “counted dross for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus our Lord.”  For the first time in my life I saw a man earnestly turning into reality the principles which others confessed with their lips only.  That the words of the New Testament contained