Frercuson—Address delivered before the Academy. 197 
generation whose minds are restless with unsatisfied speculation, and 
the very clothing of whose ideas begins to show the polish of thread- 
bareness as much as of culture. 
But although some of the finest intelligences of our day have been 
attracted to this field, and still hover about it, the subject does not 
commend itself to acceptance in literary centres. A man whose educa- 
tion has been completed at a University does not care to learn a new 
language and a new Classical Dictionary with a view merely to the 
expression of critical opinion for an audience at present but limited in 
number and probably better read in the subject than he is. To illus- 
trate what I mean, let me revert to the Vision of Mae Conglindé. 
Although published in a widely-read organ of taste and information, 
it never, so far as I know, received the slightest notice in any work 
of criticism, or Chair of Letters in any of our Universities; and the 
origin of the Rabelaic school of humour continues, I believe, to be 
authoritatively referred, as before, to the Italian renaissance. It would 
appear, indeed, as if, as regards the Irish subject at large, there exists 
in the minds of the leading directors of intellectual opinion a mingled 
feeling of arrogance and apprehension, strongly obstructive to the ad- 
mission of this kind of literary remforcement. The arrogance is, no 
doubt, bred of an habitual vilipending of things Irish, which we here 
lament and deprecate, but do not wonder at; the apprehension may 
arise from a variety of considerations not properly examinable from 
this Chair or on this occasion, but may, at least, be deemed unphi- 
losophic in presence of the daily growth of what it will ultimately 
have to atone with and utilize. 
Recent events have given to the older races in this country a con- 
siderable advancement in wealth and social status; and it cannot but 
be that the change will excite a desire for, as it will increase the means 
of procuring, a higher literature of their own. As regards the rest of 
the population, including the bulk of the upper and educated classes, 
if they do not count as many generations to their first settlers and 
eponymt, they are, at least as far as birth on Irish soil goes, most of 
them by many centuries more Irish than were the great-grandsons of 
Milesius—himself but the Strongbow of an earlier conquest. All of 
them have been here long enough to take root, and they have no in- 
tention of going out. They have imbibed, whether from social or from 
cosmical influences, an Irishism of their own, and assert their claim 
to a full participation in every honour that this country can confer on 
its children or they on it. They yield to none of their countrymen in 
the desire, and they greatly excel the bulk of them in the ability, to 
make Ireland once again a home of Arts and Letters. The works of 
this Academy can testify to what they have been able to achieve in 
that direction during nearly a century of patriotic endeavour. To 
their hands mainly has been committed the guardianship of the ma- 
terials out of which such a literature as I have been contemplating 
may be evolved; and in their hands, mainly, the work of speeding 
that development now rests in this Academy. But all will depend on 
