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Another distinguished critic writing of him says: “His darting phrases made straight for the heart of unintelligence—sometimes also, no doubt, for the heart of intelligence. When he sat in Parliament he summed up the frailty of Mr. Balfour in yielding to the Tariff Reformers in the phrase: ‘They have nailed their leader to the mast.’”

He could be caustic to a degree. “I don’t mind loquacity,” he once remarked, “so long as it is not Belloc-quacity.”

“Mr. Long,” he said another time, “knows a sentence should have a beginning, but he quite forgets it should also have an end.”

In a flashing epigram he once summed up the difference between the two great English Parties: “When in office, the Liberals forget their principles and the Tories remember their friends.” Asked once to define a Jingo, he replied: “A Jingo is a man who pays for one seat in a tram-car and occupies two.”

This was, I think, the happiest period of his public life. Some have maintained that he should never have entered Parliament—that in doing so “he to Party gave up what was meant for mankind.” To me, looking back, it seems not his going in, but his coming out of Parliament, that was wrong. He was pre-eminently suited to the life. His gifts ensured him success in the House, and his avid intellect made every debate a subject of interest to him. In London political and journalistic life he found his level. He was in touch with the current of European life. Dublin he felt, after London, a backwater, for, owing to the destruction of the national life, there is no intellectual centre. Not that he would have endured living in London. He loved too much for that his Dublin, “the grey and laughing capital.” A quotation from The Day’s Burden explains at once his liking for the tonic experience and stimulus of a foreign city and his nostalgia for home. “A dead Frenchman, a cynic as they say, one Brizeux, murmurs to himself in one of his comedies as I murmur to myself every time I leave Ireland: ‘Do not cry out against la patrie. Your native land, after all, will give you the two most exquisite pleasures of your life, that of leaving her and that of coming back.’”