Death of Parnell and After

Abstract

I n a book of selections from Irish novelists, Maria Edgeworth, Lover, Lever, Gerald Griffin and others, published in 1890 in London and in New York, Yeats closed his introduction with the prophecy of an intellectual movement in Ireland at the first lull in politics. Though Captain O’Shea had already filed the petition for divorce which named the Irish leader as co-respondent, Parnell was still at the height of his power ; no one yet imagined that the affair would cause the split in the Irish parliamentary party which eventually turned the better part of Ireland from politics — at least of the material and party kind — and so contributed to a rebirth of more spiritual conceptions of nationality, going back, on the one hand, to Gaelic tradition, and, on the other, to the modern nation of Swift and Wolfe Tone and Grattan.