Kettle, then a lieutenant in the battalion, was wit, essayist, poet and orator: whether he was most a wit or most an orator might be argued for a night without conclusion; but as talker or as speaker he had few equals.

He was the son of a veteran Nationalist, who had taken a lead in Parnell's day; but the farmer's son had become the most characteristic product of Ireland's capital, which, rich or poor, squalid or splendid, is a metropolis--a centre of many interests, a forcing-house of many ideas.

Nothing in Ireland is less English than Dublin, and its tone differs from that of England in having active sympathy with the continental mind.
Kettle was always to some extent in revolt against the theories of the Gaelic League, which he thought tended to make Ireland insular morally as well as materially.

He was a good European because he was a good Irishman; and because he was both, he was, though largely educated in Germany, a fierce partisan of France.
More than all this, he had seen with his own eyes the actual martyrdom of Belgium.

Sent out by Redmond to purchase rifles, he was in the country when Antwerp was occupied, and he wrote with passion of what he heard, of what he saw.