In any event, Joyce berates the pressmen, including Myles Crawford (who is more drunk than he usually is at noon), by having them place the murders in 1881 instead of the correct year, 1882. It is virtually impossible that Joyce himself slipped in this regar; after all, 1882 was the year of his own birth. Again, Joyce's negative attitude towards Gallaher is defined as early as the short story "A Little Cloud": here, he pictures Gallaher as an apostate Irishman who wears an orange tie, sits enshrouded in a cloud of smoke, and fabricates stories about Parisian sexual excesses.
The John F. Taylor speech was part of the debate over whether the Irish language should be revived. It was impromptu and delivered by a man who had just left a sick bed. So moved is Stephen, in "Aeolus," by the quotations from Taylor's discourse, that he is, for the moment, tempted to consider remaining in Ireland to work for its eventual glorification — a seductively deadly trap for an aspiring writer.
The quotations from Taylor synthesize major themes in Ulysses: the bondage of Ireland by England is compared to Israel's enslavement by the Egyptians, and those Irish who would urge capitulation to English interests are seen as being no better than the Egyptian high priests who tried to entice the young Moses to give up the cause of freedom. Professor MacHugh, recalling patriots such as Taylor, laments the fact that he must teach Latin, the language of the Roman barbarians, and not Greek (Ulysses, when first published as a whole, in 1922, was covered in Greek blue), and he views the British of 1904 as embodiments of the ancient Romans, who were more interested in clean bodies than in pure hearts. The men agree that Ireland needs a Messiah, a Moses, to lead them to a Promised Land, but Moses (like Bloom) was never allowed to enter the land; he received only a so-called Pisgah Sight of it, a vision from afar.
