Lord Ashbourne was then Mr.Gibson, Q.C.He is now the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, and the author of the Land Purchase Act of 1885, which many well-informed and sensible men regard as the Magna Charta of peace in Ireland, while others of equal authority assure me that by reversing the principle of the Bright clauses in the Act of 1871 it has encouraged the tenants to expect an eventual concession of the land-ownership to them on merely nominal terms.
Naturally enough, he is carped at and reviled almost as much by his political friends as by his political foes.

In the time of Sir Michael Hicks Beach I remember hearing Lord Ashbourne denounced most bitterly by a leading Tory light as "a Home Ruler in disguise, who had bedevilled the Irish Question by undertaking to placate the country if it could be left to be managed by him and by Lord Carnarvon." The disguise appears to me quite impenetrable, and after my talk with him, I remembered a characteristic remark about him made to me by Lord Houghton after he had gone away: "A very clever man with a very clever wife.

He ought to be on our side, but he has everything the Tories lack, so they have stolen him, and will make much of him, and keep him.

But one of these days he will do them some great service, and then they'll never forgive him!" Lord Ashbourne went off early to look up some fine old wooden mantelpieces and wainscotings in the "slums" of Dublin.

A brisk trade it seems has for some time been driven in such relics of the departed splendour of the Irish capital.