His father recommended him to settle
in Dublin, and promised the one hundred and fifty pounds for three
more years, on condition that this advice was followed. He did not
absolutely say that the allowance would be stopped if the advice were
not followed, but that was plainly to be implied. That letter came
at the moment of a dissolution of Parliament. Lord de Terrier, the
Conservative Prime Minister, who had now been in office for the
almost unprecedentedly long period of fifteen months, had found that
he could not face continued majorities against him in the House of
Commons, and had dissolved the House. Rumour declared that he would
have much preferred to resign, and betake himself once again to the
easy glories of opposition; but his party had naturally been obdurate
with him, and he had resolved to appeal to the country. When Phineas
received his father's letter, it had just been suggested to him at
the Reform Club that he should stand for the Irish borough of
Loughshane.
This proposition had taken Phineas Finn so much by surprise that when
first made to him by Barrington Erle it took his breath away. What!
he stand for Parliament, twenty-four years old, with no vestige
of property belonging to him, without a penny in his purse, as
completely dependent on his father as he was when he first went to
school at eleven years of age! And for Loughshane, a little borough
in the county Galway, for which a brother of that fine old Irish
peer, the Earl of Tulla, had been sitting for the last twenty
years,--a fine, high-minded representative of the thorough-going
Orange Protestant feeling of Ireland! And the Earl of Tulla, to
whom almost all Loughshane belonged,--or at any rate the land about
Loughshane,--was one of his father's staunchest friends! Loughshane
is in county Galway, but the Earl of Tulla usually lived at his seat
in county Clare, not more than ten miles from Killaloe, and always
confided his gouty feet, and the weak nerves of the old countess, and
the stomachs of all his domestics, to the care of Dr.
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