ruled before and after his triumph a people that, at least in main objects, was united. Brian presided over dozens of "nations more hostile to each other and to him than to the foreigners. He and they had to use the help of the Danes against each other. Clontarf was no Bannockburn; no "Ireland against the foreigners," but Irish against Irish, Brian against Maelmordha. As Brian had sought aid from the Danes more than once so Maelmordha did in that last great battle. Brian's kingships meant the putting of the Dal Cais over the old highkingly house-Kincora over Tara. It meant the crushing of a dozen kings, who thought him merely their equal, the crushing of tribes accustomed to Dalcassian rule, crushing of the men of Desmond and the Dessi in his own province, crushing, wasting, bereavement on every hand. Alfred's kingship raised all Saxondom and Bruce's the cause of Scotland, so the Saxons and Scotch felt their king's power as their own personal asset, but for many of the Irish Brian's death removed an unbearable yoke.

Brian's panegyrists were not altogether wrong when they likened him to David. The two were beaten into shape by hard fortune and personal danger and trained in guerilla warfare, till each became head of his own tribe and then of all the nation. But, here is the difference between the son of Jesse and the son of Cenedid-the mass of the northern Irish never sent to Brian, at Kincora, saying: "We are your flesh and when Maelsechlainn was king over us you led and brought in Erin and you shall be our captain." He never (so far as we know) took active steps permanently to conciliate the other great tribes; his victories were as often over them as over the Northmen; so, when he lay dead his nearest allies broke away to plot and lay ambuscades against the shattered Dal Cais.

His kingdom depended on his life; after that it melted and cracked asunder like ice in sunshine. His designs were all wrecked after his crowning victory. Save that he shattered the organised mass of foreign heathendom* that an Irish prince brought against Ireland, his greatest victory was perhaps even less an act for the good of Ireland than the little skirmishes on Craglea and in the woods of Tradree, which were not for his own gain but for the Irish cause alone. No trace of his power was visible under his sons-the Connachtmen burned his palace two

* There may have been a design to found a Danish kingdom in Ireland like that founded in England by Swegn, 1013, or by Canute, 1014 and 1017.

years after Clontarf, and his sons and grandsons were ever at each others throats. As it was before his time so was it after death-dreary blood-spattered annals of rule-less, feeble princelets and almost nominal over-kings, while kaleidoscopic combinations of Danes and Irish went on for six generations until to the chaos was added the Norman rule which, even in its furnace, could not hammer the tribes into a nation.

Still his life was not a failure; he gave Ireland a historic hero. Like Nelson, he was greatly favoured by death. Had he "returned to Kincora " again what (in his own dying words) had he to gain? A few years* of feebleness, perhaps dotage, perhaps to see, like David, his beloved sons' hatred ripen into bloodshed. Though he knew it not, Brian was crowned at the last by victories above Clontarf-the victory over the Northmen and their religious zeal at its white heat and most strenuous endeavour-the victory of waiting unflinchingly for death, as he saw it come on at a foot pace while he prayed for his people. Truly did his slayers call him "king" and "priest "in his hearing. For him the pains of death were but for a moment, and they left him with his glory at its height to be wrapped in the love of all his nation for ever.

MY LITTLE SONG

(From the German of Rev. H. Opitz, S.J.)

Oн, might I be a little bird,

I'd sing by grove and flood,

In sunshine bright, in mild starlight,

The Mother of my God.

My little song would not be long;

I'd sing with all my heart

These small sweet words, like song of birds:

"How good, how good, thou art!"

-Translated by S. L. EMERY.

*He was aged 91 accoruing to Ann. Four Masters, but only 72 (born

941-2) Ann. Ulster, which seems more likely.

Y

MY MOTHER

(From the French)

ESTERDAY, in trying to bring order out of the chaos

that reigned in my library, I came across the old, faded book in which my mother taught me to read.

It was a school prize which she had won, a "Life of St. Louis," bound roughly in soft leather, and published at the beginning of the Restoration.

This souvenir of my mother's childhood is filled with memories of my own childhood days. I glanced through the faded yellow leaves in which I learned-oh! so slowly, and with what effort to spell the words she pointed to with her knitting needle; and while gazing at this relic of the past I suddenly realised that a little girl had bent her studious head over these same pages, long years ago, and that little girl was my mother.

A strange thing! this thought that my mother had once been a child. It comes to me for the first time with a feeling of wonder and deep emotion.

My mother was near forty years of age when I was born. In her youth, so I have been told, she had great beauty and freshness of complexion, but the only portrait of her that exists to-day was taken a few years before her death, and as far back as I can remember, her beloved face seemed to me already touched by age. Those who remember their mother as beautiful and young, do they experience a certain sweetness in recalling her thus? It may be. It may be. Yet, I think those are the privileged ones whose first look beheld a face leaning over their cradle marked with the stress of life; and to whom their mother was ever old.

The memory they cherish of her, if not dearer, will be more sacred, and all that is venerable in age will but add to the grandeur of motherhood.

This old worn book, in which my mother taught me the difficult art of reading, this book which belonged to her in her schooldays, brings back to me the fact that she was once a little girl. But I find it hard to picture her games, her childhood tasks, her girlish dreams, or the joys of her married life. I wish to see in her only my mother, my dear old mother.

It seems to me that I should fail in that command of God,

"Honour thy father and thy mother," and that some of the tender respect with which her dear image is enshrined in my memory would vanish, did I think of her for one instant out of her maternal rôle without the first snows that touched her hair, and the wrinkles that lined her face when I was a little boy.

It needs a pen more delicate than mine, and words the choicest and most ethereal, to express this reverend and jealous feeling; this delicate scruple; this nuance d'âme. I can give but the faintest idea of it in recalling the touching and profound mystery of Christian faith; the mystery that shrouds the Mother of Christ in an ideal of purity.

Yes, for him whose heart is truly filial his mother is immaculate. Moreover, is it not natural that I should evoke only under the guise of motherhood her for whom I was always a little child.

When she died she was seventy-one years of age and I was thirty-three. I was then a man-a man who had lived, worked, enjoyed, suffered who had pressed many times through the flame of his passions; a man who had remained faithful to his early principles, but was guilty, alas! of many faults, and who had lost his innocence.

And my mother knew it.

She knew my strivings and encouraged me: my weaknesses and excused them. She shared my joys and consoled me in dark hours. A woman of great strength of mind and sure judgment, who spoke to me as a man would when I sought her counsel, yet I became once more for her her child, her little child, when I needed her protecting love.

Not only do I recall her thus, when, crushed by sorrow, I could find no comfort, save in embracing my mother and drying my scalding tears on her cheek, as I used to do when she carried me in her arms. No, it was in the little nothings of daily life that my good mother treated me as she did in her childhood, naïvely attributing to me thoughtlessness and imprudence.

"Be careful of that step at the foot of the stairway ... Do not take cold . . . Have you a handkerchief ?" . I pity those who resent or do not receive with a tender smile these childish recommendations. But perhaps more than another was I the object of these loving attentions, for in my youth I had many serious illnesses. My mother was ever anxious about me; not with the ordinary solicitude that surrounds a child, but with the anxiety that keeps guard over a delicate child.

One winter the physicians sent me south, and upon my return, after an absence of some months, I found my mother so changed

that the following year I remained in Paris, where I lived a prisoner during the bad winter months. She was then failing, and very weak, but ever faithful in her tender and untiring ministrations.

I recall those sweet hours: hours of perfect satisfaction, in an atmosphere of maternal tenderness, while I turn over the leaves of the book in which my mother taught me my letters, in looking for, and kissing, her finger prints; and yet, what anguish, what sorrow, I caused that admirable woman!

Not that she ever for one moment doubted my respect and my love. But, oh! one is young; one rushes through life, swept on by the wind of desire, and one forgets that at the family fireside, alas! too often abandoned, there sits an old and lonely mother-filled with infinite indulgence, who scarcely dares address a timid reproach to her big son; who is alarmed at the dangers he is running; who suffers in seeing him lose his candour and purity, and who weeps.

Should these pages fall into the hands of a young man, may they stop him on the brink of some serious fall . . . The deepest bitterness his soul can know in his declining years will be the thought, that while he had not been a bad man, not a man who could reproach himself with having failed in the essential things of life, yet he made his mother weep.

It is thirty years since I lost mine, and I had always the heart of a son. On that day my youth fled, and something was taken from me that can never be given back. Never before have I so often gone back in memory to my dear mother as during this illness and long convalescence: a time filled for me with grave meditations. In repeating, after so many years, the prayers she taught me in my childhood, my soul struggles to lift itself towards God;

The hope of seeing again my mother made me long to believe in eternal life. Oh, how I thought of her when, to merit the recompense of finding her in Heaven, I vowed that the time that remained to me should be filled with purer dreams and better actions. Christ, who has placed His Mother so high in the Divine Kingdom, will bless the prayer of a son and a Christian.

Many pretend that our feeble intelligences are incapable of conceiving the extent and perfection of the joys reserved for the elect! But it seems to me, an humble-minded man and a poor sinner, that I already glimpsed Paradise, when, as a child, I slept in my mother's arms.

MARIAN LINDSAY.