In the late 1880s, before The Southwark Club became the Irish Literary Society of London, "a young man found his way to the Club, who was just beginning a highly remarkable Irish literary career, and who found in the Club's proceedings an attraction which brought him over miles of London many time afterwards, till gradually he became one of ourselves. We had met his name in the Irish Fireside and in the Dublin University Review (edited by T. W. Rolleston, whose acquaintance was to come somewhat later). In appearance he was tall, slight, and mystic of the mystical. His face was not so much dreamy as haunting; a little weird even - so that really if one were to meet him on an Irish mountain in the moonlight, he would assuredly hasten away to the nearest fireside with a story of a new and genial ghost which had crossed his path. "He spoke in a hushed, musical, eerie tone; a tone which had constant suggestions of the faery world, of somebody `in `em' (that is, in the councils of the fairies) as we say in Ireland. His name was W. B. Yeats. He lectured for us shortly afterwards, bringing with him on that occasion a gifted Irishman who was destined to be a comrade later on Mr John Todhunter. Some of us thought till then that we had a very tolerable acquaintance with the ways and doings of the Irish fairies, but Yeats's lecture (of course it was on the good people), was some thing of a revelation to us - in fact he spoke as one who took his information firsthand.
"His only error was to speak unduly of the soulths and sheogues of his own country, but the South had a sturdy champion in John Augustus O'Shea, who gave it as his experience that there were more fairies on a square foot of Knockshegowna than in all the County Sligo."
This from a book The Irish Literary Revival by W. P. Ryan, published by the author in London in 1894. And that W. P. Ryan would surely be, on return to Ireland, the editor of the Irish Peasant and later the Irish Nation, and surely, too, father of Desmond Ryan whose Remembering Zion is one of the most evocative books on the period 1916 to 1922.