meetings; and hailed, and hallowed, and all but crowned him on the hill of Tara. These were perilous ovations, and they did their work. Of all the slaves that swelled his triumphs, there was not one to whisper, "Remember that thou art a man”—and he forgot it. Implicit obedience was the homage he demanded.* Contradiction incensed him, equality affronted him; and, while invoking "liberty," he waved an iron scepter. When emancipation became law, he had half the representation of Ireland in his hands. And how did he use an influence so responsible? Oriental in power and Oriental in principle, he entered St. Stephen's with a train of mutes. Let me turn to contemplations more genial. I do so willingly. The vantage ground of Mr. O'Connell's life was that which he took in the struggle for emancipation. It was truly a splendid and soul-stirring spectacle. At first he stood very nearly alone; but, like the Highland chieftain on his hill-top, he held the holy symbol before the people, and they at once arose the people, emphatically and exclusively the people; * It would be difficult to select from the circle of his very numerous acquaintance a single person upon whom he did not pour out the vials of his wrath for daring to hold an independent opinion. Of course I could not expect to be an exception. On a matter of parliamentary inquiry, on which I had quite as much experience as himself, our judgments differed, and I fared accordingly. No one could ever tell, however, when the storm might arise; but he had it ready, and often nursed it in smiles. After walking down with me to the House of Commons one evening, arm in arm, as friendly as possible, he vehemently assailed me on the subject alluded to. He refused to retract. No alternative was left me but to right myself, which was done in a way by no means to his satisfaction. After my excellent friend Colonel Perceval, in his place in Parliament, read my letter of reply, Daniel fell into one of his paroxysms. "The gallant member," said he, "may now congratulate himself on having severed a friendship of twenty-five years' standing." Friendship indeed! His translation of the "idem velle et idem nolle” must have been a curiosity. For six months and upward, when we met, his look was a wild glare. At last it pleased his Jupitership to relent. He walked up to me one day, in the Reform Club, in high goodhumor: "Charles, shake hands—I'm tired not speaking to you. I FORGIVE YOU!" for, shame to say, the nobility and aristocracy held aloof. Ultimately and eagerly partakers of the prize, they shrank from the perils of the conflict. They did even worse-they did all they could to discountenance O'Connell. Pompously styling themselves the "natural leaders" of the Roman Catholics, they hated the talent, intrepidity, and perseverance which shamed their hereditary sloth, and scorned their self-satisfied inferiority. But determined, undaunted, indefatigable, through toil, and danger, and difficulty of every kind, he led the people to the promised land, and, with better fate than his prototype, entered it along with them. Having done this, he should have died. In 1829 he reached the summit of his glory. Every subsequent step was downward. I purposely abstain from tracing that descent. Far more pleasing is it to me to leave him on the height, whence, looking down upon the millions he had liberated, he could hear their outburst of joy, and happiness, and homage. At the bar O'Connell was an admirable Nisi Prius advocate-a shrewd, subtle, successful cross-examiner—an excellent detailer of facts-a skillful dissector of evidence. His speech in the case of the King v. Magee is a noble specimen of his talents and intrepidity. This he published afterward as a pamphlet. Often his junior, I had the means of knowing that, in the management of a case, he was both discreet and dexterous. Toward the bench respectful, independent, and at times even stern, he was ever toward his colleagues sociable and kind. In Parliament, which he necessarily entered late, his success was only average. In the midst of his multiplicity of affairs, he read every novel of the day, and was a great reciter of poetry. Some of his parodies and poetical applications in debate caught the humor of the House, and were considered felicitous. Among these was his sneer at the smallness of Lord Stanley's personal adherents after some general election: "Thus down thy hill, romantic Ashbourne, glides His celebrated parody on three very excellent, and certainly very good-humored members of Parliament, Colonels Sibthorp, Perceval, and Verner, was extremely ready, and produced a roar: "Three colonels, in three distant counties born, To beard the third, she shaved the other two." Two of these gentlemen looked as if they never needed a razor, and the third as if he repudiated one. Perhaps the drawback on this was its personality; but personality was one of his besetting sins. It was his instant and invariable resource. He had a nickname for every one who presumed to thwart him —curt, stinging, and vulgar, suiting the rabble taste, and easily retained in the rabble memory. There was not a lord lieutenant or a secretary that did not carry away with him a not very welcome addition. Some of these were severe, and all of them insulting. But he was ever heedless of the pain he inflicted, if he gained a purpose. It is distressing to relate, what it would be both impossible and unpardonable to omit, that, to the achievement of his object, he unhesitatingly sacrificed all the conventional usages of society. The slave of some ungovernable impulse which permitted no control, and oftentimes set decorum at defiance, he was not always conscious of the excesses he committed, or of the reprehensible extent to which they were carried. This was a weakness inseparably interwoven with a nature otherwise not unkindly. But so it was. Oppose him in his wildest whim, or contradict him on the veriest trifle, and an instant hurricane of rage arose, irrespectful of all life's proprieties, and sweeping friend and foe indiscriminately before it. It is very true that, in calmer moments, repentance often came, but it could not repair the injury, nor did it prevent its repetition. His personal epithets, flung about at random, and often produced by momentary excitement, though sometimes very happy, are, perhaps, better L unrecorded. One instance, however, somewhat partaking of this character, it would be an injustice to omit. In a political trial, he had charged upon the attorney general, Saurin, whom he hated, some official unfairness, of which his colleague, Bushe, chivalrously assumed the responsibility: "If there is blame in it," said he, I alone must bear it : "Me, me, adsum qui feci, in me convertite ferrum—” ” "Finish the sentence, Mr. Solicitor," exclaimed O'Connell ; "add "Mea fraus omnis.'" But, after all, O'Connell's true theater, where he stood alone and unapproachable, was an Irish aggregate meeting. There, indeed, he shone in all his glory-a star of the first magnitude. His was that marvelous admixture of mirth, pathos, drollery, earnestness, and dejection, which, well compounded, form the true Milesian. He could whine, and wheedle, and wink with one eye, while he wept with the other. His fun was inexhaustible; but if it ever halted, then out came his now familiar stereotypes-his own green isle"-his "Irish heart"-his "head upon the block"-his "hereditary bondsmen, know ye not"—and, above all, his inimitable warning-" dead or alive, don't trust the Rices!"—and they never failed him. He made the mob his friends by making himself one of them. He studied them at their wakes and at their fairs, and howled the humors of each in their own mellifluous jargon. The Irish peasant hails as a brother the adept in his language, and O'Connell lisped its beauties in his cradle. A specimen of his manner at one of these motley meetings may not be unamusing. At the Clare election, to the horror of Vesey Fitzgerald, the rival candidate, and a member of the then administration, Daniel (with the aid of his priests) polled tenant against landlord—an utter abomination in a country where hitherto the serfs had been driven to the poll in droves, “habited like Nebuchadnezzar when he ran at grass.' ""* Vesey, a lord in em * Curran. bryo, could not stand it, and he fled. Next day was a great day for Daniel. Priest, curate, coadjutor, bishop-he who, with no franchise, had voted notwithstanding, and he who, having one, had voted very often-the whole available population—the pure children of nature, as he called them, and some of them most justly, hailed their champion as he shouted from the hustings, "Boys, where's Vasy Vigarald? Och hone, Vasy, but it's me that's dull without ye. Righi, mavourneen! righi,* and send the bell about for him. the cry for you, "Stolen or strayed, Lost or mislaid, The President of the Board of Trade." Here's During a Dublin election, where Mr. West was a candidate, he resorted to his nicknames, and “ sow West" and "ugly West" were lavished liberally. Gentlemen," said West, good humoredly, "Mr. O'Connell takes advantage of me, for he wears a wig." "I scorn all advantage," exclaimed Daniel, casting off the ornament, and exhibiting a scalp literally without a hair between it and heaven, "I scorn all advantage: compare us now, boys; is sow West the beauty?" Daniel was pretty sure of the apple. Fun in Ireland is not the less efficient when it happens to be practical. Living, as he did, in constant turmoil, and careless, as he was, to whom he gave offense, O'Connell of course had a multitude of enemies. Of this, himself the cause, he had no right to complain; but he had a right to complain of the calumnies they circulated. Most rife of these was a charge of want of courage—in Ireland a rare and very detrimental accusation. O'Connell, during his latter years, declined dueling, and publicly avowed his determination. The reason given, and given in the House of Commons, was, that having "blood upon his hands, he had registered a vow in heaven.' To this there could have been no possible objection had he included in the registry a vow not to offend. The real charge to which he * "Run, darling! run." |