Mgr. Walsh has added one more to the small number of volumes which provide the authentic materials from which the history of the Catholic Church in England and in Ireland during the past hundred years will have to be written. He promises a second volume to deal with the pastoral work of the great Archbishop who, during nearly forty years of rule in Dublin, played an important part in obtaining the reform of the Irish land system, and after many years of patient effort against innumerable discouragements helped to win for Ireland its National University. He became its first Chancellor, and the photograph of him taken at the time, which is reproduced in Mgr. Walsh’s biography, shows him still vigorous. But his labours on the Statutory Commission of the University brought on a nervous breakdown, which left him a physical wreck for the remainder of his life. For the last ten years he took very little active part in public affairs. He died when the Black and Tan regime in Ireland was still rioting unchecked; and when the first tentative efforts of Sir Alfred Cope to bring about a settlement by negotiations, in which Archbishop Walsh himself took part, had not yet shown any hope of peace.

But though the Archbishop died a broken and disillusioned man, he had seen great improvements in the position of the Irish Catholics during his own lifetime, and no man had done more to bring them about Not only because of his ecclesiastical position, but by his intellectual abilities and courage, he was one of the most important public men in Ireland during the nineteenth century.