The second sentence begins thus--'You
are sacrilegiously arresting the arm of your parent kingdom fighting the
cause of man and nature, when the triumph of the fiend of French police-
terror would be your own instant extirpation--.' And the letter closes
thus:--'I see but one awful alternative--that Ireland will be a perpetual
moral volcano, threatening the destruction of the world, if the education
and instruction of thought and sense shall not be able to generate the
faculty of moral discernment among a very numerous class of the
population, who detest the civic calm as sailors the natural calm--and
make civic rights on which they cannot reason a pretext for feuds which
they delight in.' As he spoke freely and boldly to others, so he spoke
loftily of himself: at p. 313, of 'The Harp of Apollo,' on making a
comparison of himself with Socrates (in which he naturally gives the
preference to himself) he styles 'The Harp,' &c., 'this unparalleled work
of human energy.' At p. 315, he calls it 'this stupendous work;' and lower
down on the same page he says--'I was turned out of school at the age of
fifteen for a dunce or blockhead, because I would not stuff into my memory
all the nonsense of erudition and learning; and if future ages should
discover the unparalleled energies of genius in this work, it will prove
my most important doctrine--that the powers of the human mind must be
developed in the education of thought and sense in the study of moral
opinion, not arts and science.
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