Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 2.djvu/291

 talked jauntily of 'having possibly invested £1 in a Repeal Card.' He will not get another banquet in Tipperary during this generation."

When the fog and the east wind became intolerable we turned our faces to the South. Paris, Florence, Rome, of what a dazzling journey they are the étapes, but the prudent man remembers that it is a journey which the whole civilised world has made, and that there is nothing more to be said on that topic. The morning after our arrival in Rome a visitor came to us, who proved to be the most gracious of friends and the most skilful of guides to the Immortal City. Father Tom Burke, the Irish Dominican orator, had risen to eminence during my absence in Australia, but I knew him and he knew me by repute, and we speedily became friends. I necessarily recognised immediately what keenness of intellect, natural humour, and knowledge of character Father Burke possessed, but his pulpit oratory, when I came to hear him, was a profound surprise. He was preaching at the time in one of the churches in the Piazza del Popolo, where sermons are delivered weekly for the English, Irish, and American visitors of various creeds who winter at Rome, and in a letter to his biographer I afterwards stated the impression he made upon me:—

"I had heard all the contemporary preachers of note in the Catholic Church at least, and all the Parliamentary orators of the day, but I was moved and impressed by that sermon beyond any human utterance to which I had ever listened. I despair of conveying the sort of impression it made upon me, but I think persuasiveness was its most striking characteristic. He marched straight to a fixed end, and all the road he passed seemed like a track of intellectual light. You were gradually drawn to adopt the preacher's views as the only ones compatible with truth and good sense. His accent was Irish, but his discourse bore no other resemblance to any Irish utterance with which I was familiar. We have the school of Grattan and the school of O'Connell, the artificial and the spontaneous, into which most Irish oratory may be distributed; but Father Burke's belonged as little to one as to the other. The lucid narrative which, without arguing, was the best of arguments; the apt illustration