should be stirred up to fight, then it was all right they should do it; and if He didn’t will, why surely then there would be no fighting at all.  I am not sure it could have been expressed better.  I have heard horrid stories in detail of the famine.  They are getting historical now, and the people can look back at them and tell them quietly.  It is very lucky for us that we are let to get off for the most part with generalities, and the knowledge of details is left to those who suffer them.  I think if it was not so we should all go mad or shoot ourselves.

“The echoes of English politics which come over here are very sickening:  even The Spectator exasperates me with its d—­d cold-water cure for all enthusiasm.  When I see these beautiful mountain glens, I quite long to build myself a little den in the middle of them, and say good-bye to the world, with all its lies and its selfishness, till other times.  I have still one great consolation here, and that is the rage and fury of the sqireens at the poor rates; six and sixpence in the pound with an estate mortgaged right up to high-water mark and the year’s income anticipated is not the very most delightful prospect possible.

“The crows are very fat and very plenty.  They sit on the roadside and look at you with a kind of right of property.  There are no beggars—­at least, professional ones.  They were all starved-dead, gone where at least I suppose the means of subsistence will be found for them.  There is no begging or starving, I believe, in the two divisions of Kingdom Come.  I see in The Spectator the undergraduates were energetically loyal at Commemoration—­nice boys—­and the dons have been snubbed about Guizot.  Is there a chance for M—–?  Poor fellow, he is craving to be married, and ceteris paribus I suppose humanity allows it to be a claim, though John Mill doesn’t.  My wedding party have not arrived.  It is impossible not to feel a kindly interest in them.  At the bottom of all the agitation a wedding sets going in us all there is lying, I think a kind of misgiving, a secret pity for the fate of the poor rose which is picked now and must forthwith wither; and our boisterous jollification is but an awkward barely successful effort at concealing it.  Well, good-bye.  I hardly know when I look over these pages whether to wish you to get them or not.

“Yours notwithstanding,
“J.A.F.”

Ireland had been devastated, far more than decimated, by the famine, and was simmering with insurrection, like the Continent of Europe.  The Corn Laws had gone, and the Whigs were back in office, but they could do nothing with Ireland.  To Froude it appeared as if the disturbed state of the country were an emblem of distracted Churches and outworn creeds.  Religion seemed to him hopelessly damaged, and he asked himself whether morality would not follow religion.  If the Christian sanction were lost, would the difference between right and wrong survive?  His own state