Some critics on the spindle side will find it easier to forgive an unsuccessful patriot than an uninventive and unauthoritative lover. Emmet in hiding near the Priory, between the no-rising and the arrest, had his almost certain chances of escape; but he could not persuade the girl, born, like Hamlet, to a tragic inaction, to strike hands with him and make the dash for liberty. Habit sat too heavily on her defrauded spirit, and insufficient faith in herself kept her where she was. The secrecy of their relations seems to have hurt and weakened her. She could no more stand up then against her father’s displeasure than she could part long after with dejection and a sort of remorse, when the face of her outer world had beautifully, almost miraculously, changed. And Emmet loved her as she was, a day-lily on a drooping stem. To quarrel with them because no fleet-footed horse, as in a novel, pranced by night to Rathfarnham to bear them away together, is to quarrel with a perfected sequence. To mark the look of this Robert, hungry for the heroic, the look of this Sarah, mystical as twilight, is but to forecast casualties. Perhaps as every soul has a right to its own kind of welfare and happiness, so it has a right to its own kind of sorrow. The second alternative suits the innocent, although it shocks the moral sense of most persons far more than would the choice of error instead of truth. To be an Emmet at all meant to get into trouble for advanced ideals. To be a Curran meant to have a keen intelligence always besieged hard, and eventually overcome, by melancholia, as John Philpot Curran’s was at the end, as Richard Curran’s was in his prime. Emmet and the young creature of his adoration were hardly used; but Fate chose not ill for them. A _révolution manquée_ with an elopement; expatriation with a marriage certificate; a change of political front with the parental blessing—all look somehow equally incongruous and out of key with those sensitive faces elected, let us say, to better things. Their story, with all deductions which can be made, has already done something to deepen the sense of human love in the world, and to broaden the dream of human liberty. Perhaps either of those games may be considered as always worth the candle.