LETTER CI. (To G. A. C.)—“ T—————, September 23, 1863.-My dear C*******,-I am hard at work copying out the poem for your perusal, and, if you will meet me at the Amiens-St. Terminus on Thursday, the 1st prox., at 6 o'clock, P.M., you will enable me to fulfil an important item in my bargain, by giving it to you on the appointed day. I am dissatisfied with it ad nauseam. If you disapprove it, there will be so much disgust removed from my conscience, and I shall be very grateful to you for the relief. Otherwise the Prisoner of Mount Saint Michael is a Frankenstein which I cannot conjure. Yours, &c., E. J. ARmstrong.”

In his next letter, he announced his final determination with regard to the promised companion poem :

LETTER CII. (To ******)" T, September 25, 1863. ... Instead of writing a new poem, I have determined to elaborate Ovoca, for a companion-poem to The Prisoner. It will be far better than to attempt to write a new one, and it will form a good introduction to our Stories of Wicklow. The plot is [good,, and the sorrow is for the most part subdued and beautiful, forming a decided contrast to the incoherent ravings of our poor friend the Prisoner. . . . The volume must be before the public by Easter.-Yours, EDMUND J. ARMSTRONG."

On the 30th of September he arrived in Dublin, with The Prisoner of Mount Saint Michael ready

in his hand to present to his friend. He had prefixed to it its " Dedicatory Stanzas," acknowledging his obligations to the generous donor of the plot; and now he tendered him the whole manuscript. It was received with surprise and gratification, and read with increasing admiration; and a letter of praise, conceived in the same brotherly and generous spirit which had prompted the relinquishment of the story, soon afterwards reached the author in Kingstown. Armstrong was so habitually disposed to depreciate everything he did, that he had come already to regard the poem as a failure; and the admiration with which it was hailed was, as his acknowledgment implies, an unexpected boon :

LETTER CIII. (To G. A. C.)-" Kingstown, October 6, 1863.-My dear C*******,-I am surprised and delighted beyond measure by the terms in which you have belauded my poem. You have bestowed upon it the very highest compliment which one man could bestow upon the work of another. To approach your ideal was indeed the height of my aspirations. To be told that I have really surpassed it would make me 'fantastically merry,' were it not for the consciousness that I have not realized my own ideal, or anything like it.

"However, I will labour to improve what I have done, and, availing myself gratefully of your suggestions, I confidently hope to win . . ., perhaps, hereafter, the applause of the public.

"My opinion of the poem is, that the events narrated in the first two days are devoid of interest. and there are too many instances of stage-effect visible throughout the entire work. But these de fects may easily be remedied. . . -Yours very sincerely, EDMUND J. ARMSTRONG."

His friends had never for a moment doubted the richness, breadth, and genuineness of his poetic gift; and indeed he himself had seldom had any real misgivings about his natural vocation; but latterly, living apart so much from critical intellects, he had grown perhaps somewhat morbidly distrustful of himself, as a man under such circumstances will; and now that he was back again among men of like tastes with his own, the chorus of laudation with which his works were received was cheering and invigorating. He never lost confidence in himself again—that is to say, he never troubled himself any more about the extent of his intellectual resources than he had determined to do about the degrees of his spiritual progress, but went steadily and perpetually ahead, thinking, writing, working joyously; and as everybody was convinced of his power, nothing arose to awaken in himself any suspicions concerning it. So closed a fertile season of his life, and opened a more fertile still.

CHAPTER XVII. 1863, ÆT. 22—.

Residence in Trinity College, Dublin.-Speeches.-More Poems. Essay on the "Character of Mephistopheles."The late Dr. James Henry: “The Wanderers.”-New and Congenial Associates.-Life in Trinity College, Dublin. A Busy Intellectual Period.-Speech on Trades' Unions.-Liking for the Philosophical Society; Essays and Discussions therein; elected its President. - Professor G. L. Craik on "The Prisoner of Mount Saint Michael." -Growing Reputation. - Long Vacation.-"Jamque Vale !"

OWARDS the end of October he took up his

abode in chambers in Trinity College, thus commencing a residence which lasted for more than a year-an agreeable change in his mode of life, as it brought him immediately into the society. of the best scholars and most advanced thinkers among the younger men of the University.

Setting himself at once to carry out his educational programme, he commenced attendance on lectures in Hebrew, and in English Literature, and, later on, in Divinity; and spoke or read papers in the Historical and Philosophical Societies. In the Philosophical Society he made but one speech this year; and in doing so, somehow or another, lost heart, and sat down before he had said one quarter of what was on his mind to say. But the subject

was Mr. Tennyson's poems, which he was reluctant to criticise in a speech at all. In the Historical Society he was nominated for an early debate in the Session, and, as the question was one on which he felt strongly, he spoke well, and received almost the highest marks of the evening-a success not usual, I think, with a speaker at his début there; and he was on all hands warmly complimented. In the meantime he was recasting his poem Oroca, and writing lyrical pieces, as the mood prompted which was pretty frequently; and among the latter pieces, written before the end of the year, were Mnemosyne, Despondency, and A Lament.

Towards the close of December he was asked to read a paper before the Philosophical Society, and chose as his subject the Character of Mephistopheles, the idea being suggested to him, as he states, by Mr. Masson's essay on The Three Devils; and the plan of the paper was struck out, one day, as he sat chatting with his friend Mr. B*******, by a little brooklet near the Military Road that runs across the Dublin Mountains between Killakee and Lough Bray. The paper is professedly merely a study and amplification of Mr. Masson's theory; but it is quite as much an expression of his own homage to Goethe's Faust, a poem, which, as has been said, he used to read over and over again with an ever-deepening insight.

1 See "Essays and Sketches."-Ed.