Whom does such a member of Parliament represent--the constituents who nominally elect him, or the leader who cracks the whip over him so sharply?
I have to-day been looking through a small and beautifully-printed volume of poems just issued here by Gill and Son, Nationalist publishers, I take it, who have the courage of their convictions, since their books bear the imprint of "O'Connell," and not of Sackville Street.

This little book of the _Poems and Ballads of Young Ireland _is a symptom too.

It is dedicated in a few brief but vigorous stanzas to John O'Leary, as one who "Hated all things base, And held his country's honour high." And the spirit of all the poems it contains is the spirit of '48, or of that earlier Ireland of Robert Emmet, celebrated in some charming verses by "Rose Kavanagh" on "St.Michan's Churchyard," where the "sunbeam went and came Above the stone which waits the name His land must write with freedom's flame." It interests an American to find among these poems and ballads a striking threnody called "The Exile's Return," signed with the name of "Patrick Henry"; and it is noteworthy, for more reasons than one, that the volume winds up with a "Marching Song of the Gaelic Athletes," signed "An Chraoibhin Aoibbinn." These Athletes are numbered now, I am assured, not by thousands, but by myriads, and their organisation covers all parts of Ireland.

If the spirit of '48 and of '98 is really moving among them, I should say they are likely to be at least as troublesome in the end to the "uncrowned king" as to the crowned Queen of Ireland.
As for the literary merit of these _Poems and Ballads of Young Ireland_, it strikes one key with their political quality.

One exquisite ballad of "The Stolen Child," by W.B.Yeats, might have been sung in the moonlight on a sylvan lake by the spirit of Heinrich Heine.
I spent an hour or two this morning most agreeably in the libraries of the Law Courts and of Trinity College: the latter one of the stateliest most academic "halls of peace" I have ever seen; and this afternoon I called upon Dr.Sigerson, a most patriotic Irishman, of obviously Danish blood, who has his own ideas as to Clontarf and Brian Boru; and who gave me very kindly a copy of his valuable report on that Irish Crisis of 1879-80, out of which Michael Davitt so skilfully developed the agrarian movement whereof "Parnellism" down to this time has been the not very well adjusted instrument.