But in The Two Chiefs of Dunboy, if anywhere, Froude shows his sympathy with the softness of the Irish character, and Morty's meditations on his return from France are expressed as only Froude could express them.

Morty was walking with his sister by the estuary of the Kenmare River opposite Derrynane, afterwards famous as the residence of Daniel O'Connell, "For how many ages had the bay and the rocks and the mountains looked exactly the same as they were looking then?
How many generations had played their part on the same stage, eager and impassioned as if it had been erected only for them! The half-naked fishermen of forgotten centuries who had earned a scanty living there; the monks from the Skelligs who had come in on high days in their coracles to say mass for them, baptize the children, or bury the dead; the Celtic chief, with saffron shirt and battle-axe, driven from his richer lands by Norman or Saxon invaders, and keeping hold in this remote spot on his ragged independence; the Scandinavian pirates, the overflow of the Northern Fiords, looking for new soil where they could take root.

These had all played their brief parts there and were gone, and as many more would follow in the cycles of the years that were to come, yet the scene itself was unchanged and would not change.

The same soft had fed those that were departed, and would feed those that were to be.

The same landscape had affected their imaginations with its beauty or awed them with its splendours; and each alike had yielded to the same delusion that the valley was theirs and was inseparably connected with themselves and their fortunes.