2/20 The Irishman is a gentleman by instinct and shrinks from wounding the feelings of another man and particularly of the man who has wounded him. He scorns to take it out of him that way. That is why the task of misgoverning him has been so easy and has come so naturally to the Englishman. One of the chief grievances of the Irishman in the middle ages was that the man who robbed him was such a boor. Insult was added to injury in that the oppressor was no knight in shining armour, but a very churl of men; to the courteous and cultured Irishman a "bodach Sassenach," a man of low blood, of low cunning, caring only for the things of the body, with no veneration for the things of the spirit--with, in fine, no music in his soul. |