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[ Aetat. 25-27 ] J O Y C Eno immediate hopes for supplanting the king either: 'Ireland has alreadyhad enough equivocations and misunderstandings. If she wants to put onthe play that we have waited for so long, this time let it be whole, andcomplete, and definitive. But our advice to the Irish producers is thesame as that our fathers gave them not so long ago—hurry up! I am surethat I, at least, will never see that curtain go up, because I will havealready gone home on the last train.' These sentences ended his firstlecture on a note of skepticism rather than of nationalism. By Italianstandards Joyce's delivery was rather cool and wanting in vivacity, but theaudience received the lecture with applause. Artifoni was delighted becauseof the credit it brought the school.Joyce was complimented on all sides. Roberto Prezioso said he wouldlike to have known Joyce's master in Italian. Exalted by this and similarremarks, and by a fee of twenty crowns, Joyce bragged to his brotherabout himself and the Irish. His own mind, he said, 'was of a type superiorto and more civilized than any he had met up to the present.' Andas for the Irish, they were 'the most intelligent, most spiritual, and mostcivilized people in Europe.' Given a chance, they would contribute 'anew force to civilization not less than that contributed in our times by theSlavs.' Stanislaus, always contentious, said that on the contrary, Irelandonce free would be intolerable. 'What the devil are your politics?' askedJames. 'Do you not think Ireland has a right to govern itself and is capableof doing so?' 27The second lecture, never given, was to be 'James Clarence Mangan,'and the third, never written, 'The Irish Literary Renaissance.' Joyce basedthe Mangan lecture, economically enough, on his University Collegelecture of fiveyears before, but this time wrestled with Mangan's limitationswhich he had then glossed over. He was now willing to concedethat Mangan had not sufficiently freed himself from 'the idols withoutand within.' 28Mangan no longer seemed to him a great poet, but a greatsymbolic figurerather, who enshrined in his verse the limitations, as wellas the griefs and aspirations, of his people. Mangan belonged, however,to Ireland's past, not its present, and Joyce clearly dissociated his ownpersonality from Mangan's fainting rhythms.The articulation, in lectures and articles, of his disconsolateness aboutIreland helped Joyce to maintain his ties there. One breach he was happyto begin mending was that with his father. John Joyce was still displeasedby the elopement, but in a forgiving mood, he had written his son inRome to ask him for a pound at Christmas time. James had no pounds,but got Stanislaus to send one to Rome so he might remail it to Dublinas his own gift. 29He followed this gesture with a letter of February 9 tohis father, written in his character of bank clerk: i have a great horrorlest you should think, that now that I have gained some kind of a positionfor myself, I wish to hear no more of you. ... on the contrary I assureyou, if you will show me what I can do or get others to do I shall do mybest to give the ball another kick.' 30John Joyce was silent for a time