Gavan

“ For a moment even Gavan couldn't speak for them. He began again in a level voice, "In those casualty lists—nearly every friend I had."
"Not the greatest friend of all; not Julian."
"Except Julian," he said dully, "our lot is practically wiped out. And now the younger men, the boys, Niel and the rest. They go and they go." He turned on her with a vehemence that cloaked his emotion. "I'm not saying that all the men out there feel the same about the war, but they fight on, some of them because—other men have died and mustn't have died in vain. The dead are the best recruiters. ”

“ MacNab is so ugly. Besides, he is an unkind man: he whips his children all the time; not whippings when they deserve it—like mine,”—Gavan looked at her, startled by this impersonally just remark,—“he whips them because he is cross himself. Why should he tell us about being good if he is as ill-tempered as possible? And he has a horrid voice,—not like the village people, who talk in a dear, funny way,—he has a horrid, pretend voice. And you stand up and sit down and have nothing to do for ages and ages. I don’t see how anybody can like church.” ”

“ How did Gavan Duffy escape conviction? In your dispatch to Lord Shrewsbury you charged it on "the perjury of one of my jurors." Enthusiastic young barristers attributed it (and with good reason indeed) to the matchless skill and eloquence of my counsel. Good, easy men, content with the surface of things, assured each other in railway carriages and over dinner tables that the Whigs, tired with pursuing me, had given me a fair jury at last. But you and I, my Lord, know that it is to you, above all men, I owe my deliverance. ”

“ The coming home of Gavan Duffy to renew the work of his early manhood after half a century of exile is an interesting incident. The young fresh revival in Irish literature in its connection with these few fine old men is as the return of the Son of Cool to the few remaining old Fians who kept true to the traditions of their youth in the heart of the wooded hills of Connaught. It is the proof that their fond hopes cannot be for ever unfulfilled. Sharing with Sir Charles Gavan Duffy the kudos of editing the New Library were two men—not unknown to their countrymen. ”

“ Gavan Blake and Mary Grant trotted along together in the bright moonlight. Just in front were Ellen and Hugh, he laughing at the excitement of the dogs and children, she looking over her shoulder and hoping to hear what Blake was saying to the heiress. As a matter of fact, he was making the most of his chances, and before long they were getting on capitally. Mary found herself laying aside her slow English way, and laughing and joking with the rest. There is something intoxicating in moonlight at any time ”

“ A woman came in every day to do up his rooms from the hotel, where he had his meals. It was an inexpensive mode of life, but one that conduced to the drinking of a good many whiskies-and-sodas at the hotel with clients and casual callers, and to a good deal of card-playing and late hours. The racehorses, too, like most racehorses, ate up more money than they earned. So that Mr. Gavan Blake, though a clever man, with a good practice, always seemed to find himself hard up. ”

“ Its fierce, wild, black men, its dense forests, its huge mountain ranges, and its swiftly-rushing, almost uncrossable rivers, frightened away many who would have dearly loved a slice of its splendid soil, if they could achieve it without undergoing such a fearful preliminary penance. But the liberal provisions of Sir Charles Gavan Duffy's Land Act induced hundreds to stifle their fears and to settle in Gipps Land, and though at first they had a very hard fight with the forces of nature, most of them have now completely subdued the forest and are well-to-do farmers and graziers. ”

“ Ned reckons he has never done any tracking, but if he could track anything it would be whisky.”
“What about going out after ’possums down the garden?” said Binjie. “Now, you youngsters, where are your ’possum dogs? I think they ought to get some in the garden.”
Everyone seemed to welcome the idea. There had been a sort of stiffness in the talk, and Gavan Blake felt that a walk in the moonlight might give him a chance to make himself a little more at home with Mary Grant, while Ellen Harriott had her own reasons for wanting to get him outside. ”

“ His musings were cut short by a tap at the door; a long, gawky youth, with a budding moustache, entered and slouched over to a chair. He was young Isaacstein, son of the Tarrong storekeeper, a would-be sportsman, would-be gambler, would-be lady-killer, would-be everything, who only succeeded in making himself a cheap bar-room loafer; but he was quite satisfied that he was the right thing.
“What’s doing, Gav?” he said. “Who’s the letter from?”
“Oh, business—business” said Gavan Blake.
“What’s doing with you?”
“Doing! By Gad, I’m broke. The old man won’t give me a copper. ”

“ But if we succeed—when we succeed, did God ever bless men with so intoxicating a triumph as will be ours? To see our nation arise again like a young queen proud and happy. To see prosperity run like fresh blood through all the veins of society. To see our Irish race year after year growing more prosperous, more manly, more virtuous. ”

“ I tell thee spirits pure from vice are present to thy inmost thoughts, when terror, when madness when spectres, and when death surrounded thee, our influence put to flight the ministers of darkness we placed thee in the moonlight vale; and now upon thy head I pour the planetary dew, from Hecat’s dread agents, it will free thee from wildering fear and gloomy superstition' She ended, and Sir Gawen impatient to express his gratitude was about to speak, when suddenly the light turned pale and died away, the spirits fled and music soft and sweet was heard remotely in the air. ”

“ You must choose your side, and choose quickly. If you love famine, stripes, and dishonour; if you are prepared to abandon your arms and your liberty, join the red ranks of England; if you love justice, if your heart warms at the memories of the dear land, if it swells with the hope of her deliverance and her glory, God bless you, your side is with your country—your rank is beneath the green banner of Ireland.
"Let no man who has stimulated the quarrel by word or deed presume to hold back now. ”

“ Will Ireland at last perish like a lamb and let her blood sink in the ground, or will she turn as turns the baited lion? Your path of safety as well as of honour is now the public highway. No bye-way of your own will carry you through the perils that beset, and the greater perils that are before you. ”

“ We have had delightful climbing of great wild mountains, and looking down over the brink of fearful sea-cliffs, and rambling through endless dismal wastes of moor and bare fields of rock, and among deep, silent, dark glens, where lie the mountain lakes, gloomy or placid—and we have heard the sullen roar of the Atlantic, and seen the long lines of foaming waves advancing in battle array, and like all the proud old armies of men rushing into oblivion. And we have viewed ruins dear to Irish hearts—seats of ancient learning, dwellings of Irish power and pride. ”

“ We fight, because the honour, the interest, the necessity, the very existence of this ancient nation depends upon our valour and devotion at this hour. If we cower, if we flinch, if we falter, the hopes are gone for which our fathers and our fathers' fathers gave their life's blood. ”

“ To the eyes of the Irish millions who knelt by the Croppies' grave with brothers' love, and sang the fierce songs of the era by their hearths, and on the hill-sides, and at their wakes and fairs and merry meetings, there was clearly discernible in the monster meetings an intense under-purpose, which filled their souls with passionate expectation. ”

“ Has our land no natural rights? Is there some ordinance of God by which we, living in the same latitude and under the same skies, must see our people die of hunger and nakedness! Let us not blaspheme Providence; let us not even blame England; the fault is not England's, but our own. It is the right of this Irish people, and their sacred duty, to protect themselves against all aggressors on the face of the earth. And surely the time has come, while we still suffer under one calamity and await another, to determine the cause of our misery, and to take measures for our protection. ”

“ Among a people so equipped a national literature would spring up—a literature not founded on the gasconade and gormandising of pseudo Irish dragoons or slang stories about the blunders of Paddy and Andy, but genuinely native, recalling all we love or hate in the chequered history of our country, and reviving a thousand memories which made her sons proud to call her mother. ”

“ Better that the Nation, and all who contribute to it, were sunk in the Red Sea than that they should become the watchword of faction, the pretext of division, the rock whereon to make shipwreck of so noble a cause! ”

“ The most destructive wars, the inhuman massacres whose memory appals mankind; the scourges of God, the plague and the cholera, never desolated a nation like this famine. Men fell dead daily in the streets and by the wayside, and were flung coffinless into the earth. Whole districts were swept bare as a desert of human life. Men fled from it into exile, dying in multitudes on the sea, or perishing in foreign countries, till a new plague sprung from the stench of their unburied corpses. A population larger than that of some Free States of Europe was destroyed by these inhuman deaths. ”

“ Justice to Ireland—justice to all lands, and to Ireland first as the land that needs it most—the whole English nation (except the quacks and knaves of it, who in the end are men of negative quantities and of no force in the English nation) does honestly wish you that. Do not believe the contrary, for it is not true; the believing of it to be true may give rise to miserable mistakes yet, at which one's imagination shudders. ”

“ We fight for liberty to live. Hundreds of thousands of Irishmen would again die in the tortures of famine; hundreds of thousands of Irishmen would again fly over the wide sea to perish of unknown horrors in the swamps of Canada and the woods of Michigan, if we bowed our necks to the Parliament of England at this hour. ”

“ The rights which she sought in vain to purchase with her tears; which she springs up at last to purchase with her heart's blood only when the sacred character of manhood, without which our life is lower than the dog's or the slave's, is trampled under the feet of her foreign lords. ”

“ There are terrible traditions shadowing the word Liberty in Ireland. Let it be our task, men of this generation, descendants of martyrs and sufferers and heroes, to make it a glad evangel of happiness—a reign of truth over fictions and symbols of intellect over prejudice and conventionalism—of humanity over tyranny and oppression. ”

“ Well, when poor old Ireland has succeeded again in making a man of insight and generous valour, who might help her a little out of her deep confusions—ought I not to pray and hope that he may shine as a light, instead of blazing as a firebrand, to his own waste and his country's! Poor old Ireland, every man she produces of that kind, it is like another stake set upon the great Rouge-et-Noir, of the Destinies: 'Shall I win with thee, or shall I lose thee too—blazing off upon me as the others have done?' She tries again, as with her last guinea. ”

“ In an agricultural district a common scene consists of undulating hills of rich chocolate soil running down into long grassy valleys, or succulent meadows, fattened by the great fertilisers, rain and sunshine. It is a blessed land, seamed with gold, fanned with healthy breezes, and bathed in a transparent atmosphere like the landscapes of Guido. When men of Northern energy and perseverance possess this gracious soil we shall see marvels. ”

“ I hate party riots as much as you do; but when a riot breaks out I wish with all my heart that the Catholic may have the best of it; for the Orangeman or his sympathisers will never listen to the claims of justice till we prove strong enough to be dangerous. ”

“ It cannot be death you fear, for you have braved the plague in the exile ship of the Atlantic, and plague in the exile's home beyond it; and famine and ruin, and a slave's life and a dog's death; and hundreds, thousands, a million of you have perished thus. ”

“ The Prime Minister of England, looking upon the desolation which has made our country a graveyard and a lazar house, tells us that he will resist our just claims for the management of our own affairs with the sword of the Empire. How can we answer but with the sword of Ireland? If famine has weakened the right arm of the people it has not paralysed His arm who rules the destinies of battles and fights by the side of the oppressed. Shall we tamely submit to see the last remnant of the Irish race and name sacrificed to the greedy and insolent spirit of English dominion? ”

“ Because the seeds of hatred between creed and creed, between class and class, between man and man, have been studiously sown by her hand to the ruin of our strength and of our honour. Because we have been an exception to the nations of the earth. Throughout all Europe there was scarcity in the past year, in Ireland alone there were famine and death. Throughout all Europe there have been concessions to the will of the people; in Ireland alone was there insolence for concession, and tyranny for justice. We fight because we are denied peace, except at the price of dishonour ”