He must feel as if, proposing to his imagination Pear de Melba, he had in truth swallowed sand.

Let me end with a more comfortable word.

We have seen that Irish history is what the dramatists call an internal tragedy, the secular disclosure and slow working-out of certain flaws in the English character.

I am not to be understood as ascribing horns to England and a halo to Ireland.

We Irish are not only imperfect but even modest; for every beam that we detect in another eye we are willing to confess a mote in our own.