Short life of Thomas Davis, 1840-1846

SHORT LIFE

OF

THOMAS DAVIS

1840—1846

BY

SIR CHARLES GAVAN DUFFY

Those who live as models for the mass
Are singly of more value than they all.
Keep but the model safe, new men will rise
To take its mould, and other days to prove
How great a good was Luria's having lived."

Browning

ILontion
T. FISHER UNWIN

PATE&NOSTEK SQUASJB

SEALY, BRYERS & WALKER

MIDDLE ABBEY STREET
MPCCCXCV

Cfte JI3cto 3Iti»{) Libtatp

SHORT LIFE OF THOMAS DAVIS

THE NEW IRISH LIBRARY.

Edited bv

Sir CHiBLES GAYAH DDFFY, K.C.H.G.

Assistant Editors:

DOUGLAS HYDE, LL.D.,

National Literary Society,

4 College Green,

Dublin.

T. W. ROLLESTON,

Irish Literary Society,

Adelphi Terrace,

LOXDOM, W.C.

CONTENTS.

I. The Student. i83f~i838 i

II. The Thinker. 1839, 1840 21

III. The Politician. 1841, 1842 34

IV. The Journalist. 1842 69

V. The Recreations of a Patriot. 1843 125

VI. The Statesman. 1844 162

VII. Conflicts with O'Connell. 1845 ... 180

VIII. A New Departure, 1845 227

IX. Death of Thomas Davis. 1845 ••• 238

SHORT LIFE OF THOMAS DAVIS.

CHAPTER I.

THE STUDENT. 1831-1838.

HOMAS DAVIS, the most
notable Irishman of the
generation to which he
belonged, was bom in
Mallow, County Cork, on
the 14th of October, 18 14,
When he came into the world Ireland was a garrison,
in the same sense that Calcutta or Gibraltar is a
garrison to-day. The native population, who were
universally Catholics, amounted to between six and
seven millions, but none of them under the existing

2 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS-

law could occupy any office of authority in their
native country. In the town where he was bom
there was some form of municipal government, but
the administrators were exclusively Protestants.
There was an Established Church, maintained at
the common cost of the whole population, for a
minority of less than one in a dozen, and more
profusely endowed than any establishment in Christen-
dom. The only schools supported or recognized by
the State were under exclusively Protestant manage-
ment. Justice was administered in courts in which
the entire official staff were of the favoured creed.
And the recognized test of what was called " loyalty "
was the determination to perpetuate Protestant
ascendancy in the Church, the executive government,
the magistracy and the municipalities. Ireland was
represented by a hundred members in the parliament
of London, but only Protestants could be elected.
The peerage, with half a dozen exceptions, lived in
England, and the resident gentry and professional
classes led gay convivial lives, with little thought
of politics beyond the necessary precautions to keep
the populace quiet. A few prosperous Catholics,
in the mercantile or professional classes in
Dublin, demanded civil and religious liberty from
time to time ; but the Protestants who sympathized
with them were scarcely more numerous than the

THH STUDENT. 3

Indian officials to-day who would manumit the

Hindoo.

Davis belonged by birth to the minority who

enjoyed the monopoly of property and power. His

father, James Thomas Davis, was a surgeon in the

Royal Artillery ; his mother, Mary Atkins, was the

descendent of a good Anglo-Irish family, which traced

back its line to the great Norman House of Howard,

and — ^what Davis loved better, to remember — to the

great Celtic House of O'Sullivan Beare. I found

among his papers this fragment of a letter, in his own

handwriting, which probably tells all the reader will

care to know on the subject : —

" My father was a gentleman of Welsh blood, but his
family had been so long settled in England iliat they
were, and considered themselves, English. He held
a oommission in the English army. I am descended
on my mother's side from a Cromwellian settler whose
descendants, though they occasionally intermarried with
Irish families, continued Protestants, and in the Eng-
lish interest, and suffered for it in 1688. I myself was
brought up High Tory and an Episcopalian Protestant,
and if I am no longer a Tory it is from conviction, for
all those nearest and dearest to me are so still."

This mixture of Celtic and Norman blood is an
amalgam which has nourished noble fruit. Nearly
a hundred years earlier, a father of Anglo-Norman
descent and a mother of pure Celtic strain reared a
son who ranks with Bacon and Milton in the in-

4 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS.

tellectual hierarchy of these Islands, and many noted
Irishmen are of the same mixed race as Edmund
Burke.

Davis was bom after his father's death, the youngest
of four children. When he was four years of age the
family removed to Dublin, living at Warrington Place
till 1830, and afterwards at 61 (now 67) Lower
Baggot Street. His birthplace was a garden of tra-
ditional and historical romance but he left Mallow so
early that it would be fanciful to speak of boyish
impressions at an age when he was scarcely breeched.
He was educated at the noted school of Mr. Mongan,
Lower Mount Street, and in 1831 entered Trinity
College. As a child he was feeble and delicate;
and in youth he was subject to frequent fits of des-
pondency— less an individual trait, I fancy, than an
not uncommon result of the poetic temperament.
But when he became a student of Trinity all symptoms
of debility had disappeared ; he was fond of long
walking excursions, and entered almost immediately
on the systematic study which needs a solid reserve of
vigour to sustain. His boyhood passed as the boy-
hood of poets and thinkers is apt to pass ; he was
silent, thoughtful, and self-absorbed. We hear, with-
out surprise, that the boisterous spirits of schoolboys
oppressed him, and that he took slight pleasure in
their sports ; for this is the common lot of his class.

THB STUDENT. 5

So little is known with certainty of that period, that I
must borrow from a former book the few particulars
I was able to gather from his contemporaries : —

" One of hifl kinfiwomen, resident in Melbourne, who
judged him as the good people judged who mistook the
young swan for an ugly duck, assured me that he was
a dull child. He could scarcely be taught his letters,
and she often heard the sohool-boy stuttering through
' My Name is Norval ' in a way that was pitiable to see.
"When he had grown up, if you asked him the day of
the month, the odds were he could not tell you. He
never was any good at handball or hurling, and knew
no more than a fool how to take care of the little money
his father left him. She saw him more than once in
tears listening to a common country fellow playing old
airs on a fiddle, or sitting in a drawing-room as if he
were dazed when other young people were enjoying
themselves ; which facts, I doubt not, are authentic,
though the narrator somewhat mistook their significance.
Milton, in painting his own inspired youth, has left a
picture which will be true for ever of the class of which
he was a chief: —

" * When I was yet a child, no childish play
To me was pleasing ; all my mind was set
Serious to learn and know ; and thence to do
What might be public good : myself I thought
Bom to that end — bom to promote all truth.
All righteous things,' "*

He lived a life of day-dreams for the most part —
the first and most subtle discipline of a boy of genius.
He has told us the subject of his reveries.

* Young Ireland^ chap. iii.

6 SHORT LIPH OP THOMAS DAVIS.

" What thoughis were mine in early youth I like some

old Irish song,
Brimful of love and life and truth, my spirit gushed

along.
I hope to right my native isle, to win a soldier's fame,
I hoped to rest in woman's smile, and win a minstrel's

When he entered college, in his seventeenth year,
we do not pass at once from obscurity to light ; his
fellow-students or teachers had nothing to tell of that
era, except that he was habitually self-absorbed and
a prodigious reader. For four or five years he hiber-
nated among his books, slowly gathering knowledge
and silently framing opinions. From his casual talk
he was regarded as a Benthamite, a dumb questioner
of authority, discontented with many things estab-
lished, but not likely to prove a formidable opponent.
In 1836, when he was keeping his last term as a law
student in London, one of his early friends saw with
amazement silent tears fall down his cheeks at some
generous allusion to the Irish character on the stage
— a sensibility he was far from expecting in the sup-
posed Utilitarian.

Though Trinity College was the amphitheatre where
young athletes were trained to defend Protestant
ascendancy, it has always reared passionate Nation-
alists. There is scarcely a man distinguished as an
opponent of British supremacy, from Jonathan Swift

THH STODENT. 7

to Isaac Butt, who was not educated in that institu-
tion. In 1793 two of its graduates, Thomas Emmet
and Wolfe Tone, first taught nakedly the doctrine,
that the essential basis of Irish liberty was peace and
brotherhood among Protestants and Catholics. And
when Davis matriculated, there was a little knot of
generous Protestants in college who talked to each
other the old doctrine of Tone and Emmet — Ireland,
not for a sect or a caste, but for the whole Irish
people. Thomas Wallis, a college tutor, Torrens
McCuUagh,* a young barrister of great colloquial
powers, and Francis Kearney, a student, who died
before he was called to the Bar, were the leading
spirits in this connection. For a time these young
men barely knew Davis, and, as I learned from the
survivor, they misunderstood him so completely that
one of the set fixed upon him a nickname implying
contented mediocrity. They always insisted that his
nature had not then awakened, and that there was no
bint in his conversation of the fountain of thought
and passion soon to overflow, or of the indomitable
will masked under habitual silence.

That his fellow-students misjudged Davis's natural
endowments became plain enough to themselves in
the end ; but I think they misjudged as completely

* Known in latter times as McCullagh Torrens, M.P.

8 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DATES.

his opinions when they knew him first. His writings,
when he came to write, furnish evidence difficult to
resist that his voluminous studies were guided by a pur-
pose from an early period. While the young men about
him were dreaming, as the goal of life, to win the great
seal or episcopal lawn, this silent student had a rarer
and more daring ambition. He resolved to be the ser-
vant of his country, as the great men of old who touched
his heart had been. If he devoured history, and the
historical romance and drama which light up the past,
and pondered on codes and annals, it was that he
might not be an unprofitable servant. The founda-
tions of character are laid in youth ; and in his verses,
where we may most confidently seek the secrets of a
poet's heart, he tells us how early the hope of serving
Ireland began : *' when boyhood's fire was in his
blood " he read of Leonidas and Thermopylae, and
how Horatius and his comrades held the Sublician
Bridge, and prayed that he too might be worthy to do
some gallant deed for his country,

"And from that time, through wildest woe.
That hope has shone, a far light ;
Nor could love's brightest summer glow
Outshine that solemn starlight :

It seemed to watch above my head

In fonmi, field, and fane ;
Its angel voice sang round my bed,

' A Nation once again./ "

THH STUDENT. 9

He sat down before the chaos of Irish annals con-
fused by honest ignorance and distorted by industrious
malice, determined to understand the story of his
native country. So far as we know there was no
friendly hand to lead him through this pathless
thicket. Fortunate is the youth who has a guide fit
to make plain the difficult, and to light the obscure,
tracts of his study. But is he not stronger and more
sure-footed in the end who has made his way across
impediments and through the gloom by his native
force ? This silent labour was a discipline for life,
and laid the foundations of a consummate man. In
his little den in college, apart from the babble of local
politics, he studied the Irish problem in the abstract
He saw in the island all the natural capacity and
resources for self-government. Nature had furnished
the first conditions and essential equipments for a
great emporium of commercial enterprise to this land
of multitudinous rivers and harbours, lying between
two rich continents. The native race had proved
their capacity in early civilization and early commerce,
and by workmanship of marvellous beauty, before the
base jealousy of a stronger neighbour had brought
them to ruin. Their exiles in later rimes had won
distinction in war, diplomacy, and the art of govern-
ment, and there was no reason to fear that the native
sap had dried up. The people were generous, pious,

lO SHORT LIPB OF THOMAB DAVIS-

and romantic, vigilant husbandmen and skilled artisans,
and would be fortified by the mettle of harder races ;
for the Ireland he dreamed of restoring was one in which
native-born men, of whatever origin, should unite as
Irishmen, as the Briton, the Angle, the Dane, the
Norman, and the Netherlander had united in England.
It was in this spirit he approached the Irish Tories : —

" What matter that at different shrines
We pray unto one God —
What matter that at different times

Tour fathers won this sod —
In fortune and in name we're bound

By stronger links than steel;
And neither can be safe nor sound
But in the other's weal.''

A man of genius commonly attributes an inordinate
importance to the mind which gave his own an im-
pulse at a critical period of development Very often
it is a mind inferior to his own, but he is slow to per-
ceive and loth to acknowledge this fact. Coleridge
had such a feeling towards Bowles and Landor
towards Southey, and Davis had certainly such a feel-
ing towards Wallis. Wallis's position among his
associates bore a not remote resemblance to that of
Coleridge among the Lake Poets. He projected on a
prodigious scale, but he made no attempt to perform
what he projected. A thinker who does not work is
not necessarily a wasted force. His talk was full of

TBB STUDBNT. XI

new, startling, and often audacious truths ; he had the
gift of inspiring thought and awakening feeling, and,
like his great exemplar, he considered his function
exhausted when he had exhorted a man to do some
good work, without any intention of setting him the
example. One of his half-scoffing admirers used to
say that if you could work miracles or were willing to
try, and ready to be bullied for having failed, Wallis
had a fascinating series of prodigies at your service.
But to the serious mind of Davis these wild corusca-
tions were like the electric current smiting the dusky
coil of wire. They kindled his faculties for action, and
inflamed his slumbering imagination. Wallis frankly
accepted the hypothesis that he was the fire-bearer.
Not long after Davis's death, he wrote to me —

" You must conflider fJl the experience I have had for
the ten years or so that I was * Professor of Things in
general and Patriotism in particular,' in a garret in
T.C.D. If I, and surely it was I that did it (his exor-
bitantly extravagant praise of me showed it), if I loosed
the tenacious phlegm that clogged Davis's nature and
hid his powers from himself and the worid — it I kept
Torrens McCullagh for several years from deflecting into
a Whig parabola, which was his natural tendency — ^and
if I changed John Dillon from a Whig and Utilitarian to
a Nationalist and a popular leader — I must have ex-
pended rather a serious amount of magnetic force in
the task, to say nothing of the scores of others that
I mesmerized with less success, or less remarkable re-
sults."

12 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS-

In the society of these young men and their friends
the knowledge Davis had gathered got classified by
friendly discussion, and opinions which were in solu-
tion became crystallized.

A debating society is the natural training school of
ambitious students, but at this time there was no such
society in the University, and an extern Historical
Society, composed chiefly of college students, which
had trained a generation in logic and rhetoric, had
recently ceased to meet. In the beginning of 1839 a
new College Historical Society was founded. The
original members consisted of ten Conservatives and
ten Liberals ; there was as yet no talk of Nationalists.
The third name in the list was that of Thomas Davis,
the preceding ones being John Thomas Ball, since
Lord Chancellor of Ireland, and Joseph LeFanu, after-
wards distinguished as a popular novehst.

Addresses were delivered at the opening of the
Society's session in November, and at the close in
June. And Davis who became auditor, equivalent to
president, delivered the closing address in June, 1840.

It was in the Society he made the acquaintance of
a man to whom, in later years, he was accustomed to
open his whole mind and heart — Daniel Owen
Maddyn. Forty years ago, when I first meditated
writing a memoir of Davis, Maddyn sent me as a
contribution to it his recollections of his friend at this

THE STUDENT. 1 3

period, and his impression of the young men among
whom he lived.*

" I first knew Thomas Davis in the early part of the
year 1838. He had, a short time previously, published
a pamphlet on ' The Reform of the House of Lords ' — a
subject which, in those palmy days of Whig-EAdicalism,
attracted much attention. One evening, seated by the
side of Thomas MacNevin, I saw a short thickset young
man, wrapped in a fear-nought coat, shamble into the
room, and speak in a tone between jest and earnest
to several of the members. ' That,' said MacNevin, * is
Davis. 'f 'What! was it he wrote the pamphlet on
Peerage Reform ? * ' Ay, yonder you behold the cataract
that is to sweep away the House of Lords.' There was
something about Davis which I ILked at first sight.
There was a frank honesty about his face, and I liked
his large well-opened eyes.

" The Historical Society used to assemble at Radley's
Hotel, in a large room upstairs. A temporary bar was
placed across the room^ inside of which were the mem-
bers, who used to muster to the number of thirty or
thereabouts, and have an audience of visitors double

* Since his death, his kinsman, Denny Lane, has given me the
correspondence which, during the entire period of his public
career, Davis maintained with Maddyn. Maddyn became author
of the A^e of Pitt and Fox^ Leaders of Opinion, and some
other notable books. He spelt his name originally Maddm, but
in later years adopted the other form in his books and corres-
pondence.

t "Poor MacNevin ! He was far the wittiest man in the
Society, he was a favourite of all parties, and he was an admirable
elocutionist. He was a pupil of Vandendoflf ; he had great power
of artistic assumption of a rdle in speaking. He was then in the
tide of spirits, buoyant with hope. His sarcasm was poignant,
and clean cutting."

14 SHORT LIPB OP THOMAS DAVI3.

that number. The style of speaking was vicious in the
extreme, showy, declamatory, and vehement. The arts
of elocution were little studied. Fluency and vehem-
ence were the objects aimed at. To astound, not to
persuade, was the aim of nine-tenths of the speakers.
It was necessarily, therefore, a bad school of eloquence,
and was suited to produce only platform speakers.

"But there was much about the society which was
attractive. Cloistered students rubbed off against its
walls their rust and pedantry. College rivals became
friends in its social circle ; men of opposite sentiments
became acquainted ; and friendly intercourse was pro-
moted amongst those who were afterwards to meet in
scenes of real competition. After the violent speeches
there were excellent suppers, and members forgot over
broiled bones the belabouring they had inflicted upon
each other.

"Davis made no figure in this society. His solid
massive talents were not adapted for the light clever
fencing of the wordy disputants. But he liked the
society on the principle that anything amongst young
men was better than intellectual stagnation. He was
elected Auditor,, whose office was to manage its affairs
and keep the members together.

" He had no ' name ' as a speaker, but he was re-
spected as a man of talents. His moral qualities, how-
ever, were not appreciated, chiefly because, up to that
time (his twenty-fourth year), he had not openly de-
veloped all his character. It certainly did not redound
much to the discrimination of his associates that his
merits were not earlier recognized. The general opinion
of him was that he was ' a book in breeches/

"In college he read for honours, solely for the sake
of exercising his mind and training it to intellectual
discipline. The Rev. Samuel Butcher, F.T.C.D., was

THE STUDENT. 1 5

the examiner, and he said that he never heard better
answering. The candidates were men of great talents,
and were laboriously prepared by 'grinders.* Davis,
however, read by himself, and he had no recourse to
professional assistants in preparing himself for the exam-
ination. Few things were more"' effective in forming his
high-toned character than his ethical studies. They
made him a strong thinker;, and gave him large and
noble views of mankind. Of all the moral philosophers
Bishop Butler was his favourite. He placed him above
all the others for originality and grandeur of views.
If my memory does not deceive me he once called
Butler 'the Newton of Ethics.'

"He was a Church of England man of the older and
more liberal school. He was a frequent reader of the
divines of the seventeenth century ; the writings of
Jeremy Taylor were heartily appreciated by him. He
had at times a bold manner of putting his thoughts,
which might mislead an ignorant person ; but no man
was more averse than he from licentious philosophy, or
from profane discourse. I never recollect him speaking
with levity on serious subjects. His frame of mind
was naturally reverent, and the authors whom he habi-
tually read were not of the mocking school. But when
little men of little minds sought to strengthen their weak
powers by allying themselves with fanaticism he would
expose their follies in a trenchant style, against which
the refuted fanatic or convicted Taetutte would defend
himself by crying out with dissembled fright 'Irre-
ligious 1

"He was at that time as delightful a young man as
it was possible to meet with in any country. He was
much more joyous than at the time he became immersed
in practical politics. His cheerfulness was not so much
the result of temperament as of his sanguine philosophy,

1 6 SHORT LIFE OF THOMAS DAVIS.

and of his wholesome, happy views of life. The sources
of enjoyment were abundant to a man of his large
faculties, highly cultured possessing withal a body which
supplied him with vigour and energy.

'*In his politics he was what would be called a hearty
Liberal. There was a close juncture between the Irish
and English politicians, and like most of his contem-
poraries, Davis for the time chimed in indifferently well
with the Liberal party.

" On comparing him with his associates in the College
Historical Society, and with the other collegians of his
own standing whom I remember, two things especially
distinguished him. First the plainness of his character,
and the perfect simplicity of his manners. I speak the
plain truth when I declare that, from what I could see
of Davis at the time, he was altogether free from affec-
tation of every kind, and from all petty personal vanity.
He had nothing of the showy air and varnished preten-
sions of others. No man could be less of a coxcomb.
Vanities of appearance he utterly despised. He really
was what he seemed to be.

"The second point in which he differed from his con-
temporaries was in the vastly extended course of his
reading. He was a constant reader of history— of
modem travels — of the biography of authors — and of the
text writers in politics, such as Bolingbroke and Burke.
Add to this that he had not, like others, neglected his
college business. He had, besides, read some of the
chief works in legal science.

" He read from pure thirst for knowledge, with a spirit
of moral enthusiasm akin to the ardour of a brave
mariner, like Cook, voyaging to seek new countries.
He plunged into an ocean of reading, trusting to his
mental elasticity and thought for floating buoyantly
imder a deeply laden memory."

THE STUDENT. 1 7

^^^th these reminiscences of his college career the
life of the student may close; that of the man of
profound thought and decisive action was about to
begin.

We can see through Maddyn's eyes the young
auditor of the Historical Society among his associates,
but he has not lifted the curtain from a more touching
and impressive figure, the young student in his col-
lege cell. Secluded, unrecognized, and knowing him-
self only by casual flashes of insight, he was probably
supremely happy because he was possessed by the pas-
sion which is more engrossing to the boy of genius than
love of power or the love of women to manhood — the
love of knowledge. He had access to a boundless
library, the noble gateway to all the treasures of time,
and he knew how to employ and enjoy that posses-
sion. The studies by which he gradually digested
his mass of reading into principles and convictions
exhibit astonishing industry and versatility. They
are of all classes, from a chance thought scrawled on
the fragment of a letter, to the exhaustive estimate
of a standard book or a disputed era. The patient
analysis and protracted reflection from which convic-
tion is born are mirrored in manuscripts many times
revised. Systems of government, theories of philo-
sophy, the habits and language of the people, the
ballads and sayings popular among them, all pass in

1 8 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVTS-

review in this process of self-education. The future
poet was unconsciously nourishing his imagination,
the future statesman collecting his data and framing
his poHcy.

The stages by which Davis came to love all he had
been taught in childhood to deride or detest can only
be a subject of conjecture, but from the earliest record
of his opinions by his own hand, they are those of a
confirmed Nationalist He had silently grown into a
patriot. This result was not so unexampled as the
process by which it was attained. Some of the most
conspicuous figures in Irish history, between the fall
of Limerick and the emancipation of the Catholics are
men who broke away from the party of Protestant
ascendancy, and almost the first English writer who
recognized the essentially sordid character of Irish
Toryism was John Sterling, the grandson of an Irish
parson, and the son of a captain of yeomanry. But
to most of them their new opinions came from contact
with stronger minds ; Davis evolved his in the soli-
tude of his college cell

To complete Maddyn's survey of this early period
two or three facts must be mentioned. In 1836,
Davis took his degree of B.A., and in the following
year was called to the Bar.* In this era he made

* The entry in the college books specifies that he "entered 4
July, 1831, as a pensioner ; by religion, Protestant ; father's

THB STUDENT. IQ

one of those premature and false starts in life which
ardent young spirits rarely escape, and which have
produced a crop of books the writers would willingly
let die, and of speeches which the mature orator
shudders to recall This was the pamphlet to which
Maddyn alludes. He had close personal friends
among the Dublin Whigs, a party whose policy was
leavened at the moment by the generous aims of
Hudson, Deasy, O'Hagan, and others, who were
afterwards Federalists or Nationalists, and rendered
practical by the sjnnpathy of officials of a new type,
like Lord Morpeth and Thomas Drummond, then
Chief and Under Secretary in Ireland. The House
of Lords was at that time making itself odious to
reasonable men, by resisting the reform of the Irish
Church and Irish Corporations — two of the most in-
defensible of human institutions; and he made his
first plunge into politics before he was quite three and
twenty by a plan for the reform of the intractable
chamber. It is the argument of a young philoso-
phical Radical for an elected Upper House in the
interest of the Empire, and did not diifer essen-

name, James : profession, a doctor. The boy's age, i6 ; bom
in County Cork. Educated by Mr. Mongan. Entered under
Mr. Luby as college tutor." Mr. Luby, who afterwards was a
Fellow, was uncle of Thomas Clarke Luby, a Nationalist of the
generation succeeding Davis's, reared on the writings of the
Young Irelanders.

20 SHORT LIFB OP THOMAS DAVIS.

tially from the more generous Whig opinions of the
time. It is the only work of his hands of which it
may be said that the style is tame, and the tone un-
persuasive. But it is notable that, even in the storm
of political passion which then prevailed, he did not
desire to abridge the authority of a second chamber.
The absolute power of rejecting bills, he insisted,
"should on no account be touched" It was an
indispensable check on rash proposals, but it ought
to be transferred from irresponsible to responsible
hands.*

This pamphlet is the last incident in the era of
silent meditation ; after his call to the Bar he had a
higher call to the true work of his life.

* The Reform of the Lords, by a Graduate of the Dublin
University. Dublin : published for the Author by Messrs.
Goodwin & Co., Printers, 29 Denmark Street, 1837. (He still
knew so little of the commerce of literature as to adopt a method
of publication which rendered a successful sale impossible.)

CHAPTER II.

THE THINKER. 1839, 1840.

T was not to such a Society as Maddyn
describes — gay and sceptical, somewhat
sensual and worldly, devoured with ambi-
tion for immediate applause, and scarcely
more Irish in spirit than if it met by the
Isis or the Cam instead of the Liffey
—that Davis, in the summer of 1840,
delivered his first public address. New
men had joined in considerable numbers
since the reorganization of 1839, and the
''^' Society had become more serious and
sincere.

The address was a profound surprise to his few
intimate friends, almost as much as to the bulk of the
students. Where they expected familiar platitudes on
a subject exhausted by use, they heard the voice of an
original man, who echoed no one, but uttered his own
opinions ¥rith the fervour of complete conviction.

22 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS-

The dumb man spoke, and spoke like a mature
teacher. It was like the fruit of the fig-tree, rich and
succulent, but of which no preliminary blossoms had
given warning. Wallis, who was present, and who
was among those who expected little, bears witness to
its immediate effect : —

'* It excited the surprise and admiration even of those
who knew him best^ and won the respect of numbers
who, from political or personal prejudices, had been
originally most unwilling to admit his worth. So signal
a victory over long-continued neglect and obstinate
prejudice, as he had at length obtained, has never
come under my observation, and I believe it to be un-
exampled. There is no assurance of greatness so un-
mistakable as this. No power is so overwhelming, no
energy so untiring, no enthusiasm so indomitable as that
which slumbers for years, unconscious and unsuspected,
until the character is completely formed, and then bursts
at once into light and life, when the time for action is
come.'^

The annual address had commonly consisted of an
Hoge on the art of oratory, with individual criticism on
the great masters, and suggestions for the training by
which an orator whom the familiar axiom described
as a manufactured article, might be made. He re-
jected this formulary and spoke to the sons of the
gentry and professional classes, of the duties which
would [presently await them when they passed from
the college to practical life, and bade them consider
not how to harangue successfully at the Bar or in the

THB THINKER.

23

Pulpit, but how they might best become serviceable
citizens and good Irishmen.

A precis or extracts will give an inadequate im-
pression of this address, but it marks a starting point
in his life, and some fragments of it are essential to
this narrative.

In joining a society founded for the study of history,
he reminded the students that they practically ac-
knowledged how defective was the system of teaching
in the University. There they passed the precious
time between boyhood and manhood in studying two
dead languages imperfectly, and left college loaded
with cautions like Swift, or with honours like many a
blockhead whom they knew: but ignorant of the
events which had happened, the truths which had been
discovered, and all that imagination had produced
for seventeen hundred years ; ignorant of all history,
including that of their own country, and for modem
literature left to the chances of a circulating library
or a taste beyond that of their instructors. Many of
the defects of the college system might, he insisted,
be remedied by a wise use of the Historical Society.
It could teach the things which a student ought to
know — primarily the history of his own country — and
lay broad and deep the foundations of political
knowledge. Three out of four of the orators of the
last eighty years (the oratorical period in these king-

24 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS-

doms) were trained, like all the great orators of Greece
and Rome, in such societies.

"'Tis a glorious world,, historic memory. From the
grave the sage warns ; from the mound the hero, from
the temple the orator-patriot inspires ; and the poet sings
in his shroud. On the field of fame, the forum of
power, the death-bed or scaffold of the patriots, 'who
died in righteousness' — tou look — ^you pause — ^you
* swear like them to live, like them to die.'

"With rare exceptions, national history does dramatic
justice to the transactions with which it deals ; alien
history is the inspiration of a traitor. The histories of
a country, by hostile strangers, should be refuted and
then forgotten. Such are most histories of Ireland ; and
yet Irishmen neglect the original documents, and com-
pilations like Carey's 'Yindicise;' and they sin not by
omission only — ^too many of them receive and propagate
on Irish affairs ' quicquid Anglia mendax in historia
audet.'

" The national mind should be filled to overflowing with
native memories. They are more enriching than mines
of gold, or fields of com, or the cattle on a thousand
hills ; more ennobling than palaced cities stored with the
triumphs of war or art ; more supporting in danger's
hour than colonies, or fleets, or armies. The history of
a nation is the birthright of her sons — ^who strips them
of that, 'takes that which enricheth not himself but
makes them poor indeed.' "

Not national records alone, but all history taught
great lessons. Who could discuss the revolutions
which reformed England, compulsed France, and
liberated America, without becoming a wiser man ;

THE THINKBB. 2$

who could speculate on their career and not warm
with hope ?

It was the destiny of most of his audience to enter
public life, and he reminded them of its duties and
temptations to young Irishmen.

"In your public career you will be solicited by a
thousand temptations to sully your souls with the gold
and place of a foreign court, or the transient breath of
a dishonest popularity ; dishonest, when adverse to the
good, though flattering to the prejudice, of the people.
You will be solicited to become the misleaders of a fac-
tion, or the gazehounds of a minister. Be jealous of
your virtue ; yield not. Bid back the tempter. Do not
grasp remorse. Nay, if it be not a vain thought, in
such hours of mortal doubt, when the tempted spirit
rocks to and fro, pause, and recall one of your youthful
evenings, and remember the warning voice of your old
companion, who felt as a friend, and used a friend's
Uberty.

"I do not fear that any of you will be found among
Ireland's foes. To her every energy should be conse-
crated. Were she prosperous, she would have many to
serve her, though their hearts were cold in her cause.
But it is because her people lie down in misery and rise to
suffer, it is therefore you should be more deeply devoted.
Your country will, I fear, need all your devotion. She
has no foreign friend. Beyond the limits of green Erin
there is none to aid her. She may gain by the feuds
of the stranger ; she cannot hope for his peaceful help,
be he distant, be he near; her trust is in her sons.
You are Irishmen. She relies on your devotion ; she
solicits it by her present distraction and misery, X have

26 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS.

prayed that I might see the day "when, amid the rever-
ence of those, once her foes, her sons would —

' Like the leaves of the shamrock unite,
A partition of sects from one foot-stalk of right :
Give each liis full share of the earth and the sky,
Nor fatten the slave where the serpent would die.*

" But not only by her sufferings does Ireland call upon
you : her past history furnishes something to awake
proud recollections. I speak not of that remote and
mysterious time when the men of Tyre traded to her
well-known shores, and every art of peace found a home
on her soil ; and her armies, not unused to conquest,
traversed Britain and Gaul. Kor yet of that time when
her colleges offered a hospitable asylum to the learned
and the learning of every land^ and her missions bore
knowledge and piety through savage Europe ; nor yet
of her gallant and romantic struggles against Dane, and
Saxon, and Norman ; still lees of her hardy wars, in
which her interest was sacrificed to a too-devoted loyalty
in many a successful, in many a disastrous battle. Not
of these, I speak of sixty years ago. The memory is
fresh, the example pure, the success inspiring, I speak
of the ' Lifetime of Ireland.' "

To each age God gave a career of possible improve-
ment. In their time his young audience could fore-
see the speedy rise of democracy, and they had it in
their power to accelerate and regulate its march.

" A great man has said, if you would qualify the
democracy for power you must * purify their morals, and
warm their faith, if that be possible.'* How awful a

* De Tocqueville, preface to La Dimocratie en Ameriquc.

THE THINKBiE* 27

doubt ! But it is not the morality of la^ws, nor the re-
ligion of sects, that will do this. It is the habit of re-
joicing in high aspirations and holy emotions; it^ is
charity in thought, word, and act ; it is generous faith,
and the practice of self^acrificing virtue. To educate
the heart and strengthen the intellect of man are the
means of ennobling him. To strain every nerve to this
end, is the duty from which no one aware of it can
shrink.

"I speak not of private life — in it our people are
tender, generous, and true-hearted. But, gentlemen,
YOU HAVE A coxJNTBY. The people among whom we
were bom, with whom we live, for whom, if our minds
are in health, we have most sympathy, are those over
whom we have power — power to make them wise, great,
good. Beason points out our native land as the field
for our exertion, and tells us that without patriotism a
profession of benevolence is the cloak of the selfish
man."

Davis did not altogether omit the aids and sugges-
tions for self-education, of which the annual address
had ordinarily consisted, and his counsel was of the
most precise and practical character, and gives inci-
dentally an insight into the studies by which he made
himself a master of English prose.

But he passed speedily from the mere instrumental
parts of knowledge to the higher methods by which
it is acquired and used.

"Every prudent man will study subjects, not authors.
Learning is the baggage of the orator : without it, he
may suffer exhaustion or defeat from an inferior foe ;

28 SHORT LIFE OF THOMAS DAVIS.

with it, his speed and agility are diminished. Those
are best off who have it in magazines, to be drawn on
occasion. Learning is necessary to orator, and poet,
and statesman. Book-learning, when well digested,
and vivified by meditation, may suffice, as in Burke
and Coleridge ; but otherwise it is apt to produce con-
fusion and inconsistency of mind, as it sometimes did
in both these men.

"When Grattan paced his garden, or Bums trod his
hillside, were they less students than the print-dizzy
denizens of a library ? No ; that pale form of the Irish
regenerator is trembling with the rush of ideas ; and
the murmuring stream, and the gently rich landscape,
and the fresh wind converse with him through keen in-
terpreting senses, and tell mysteries to his expectant
soul, and he is as one inspired ; arguments in original
profusion, illustrations competing for his favour, memories
of years long past, in which he had read philosophy,
history,, poetry, awake at his call. That man entered
the senate-house, no written words in his hand, and
poured out the seemingly spontaneous, but really
learned and prepared lullaby over Ireland's cradl^, or
keen over Ireland's corse."

These fragments, more than anything which he has
left behind, enable us to divine the process by which
the young Conservative became a Nationalist. It is
plain that he had slowly thought out his opinions, and
was sailing by no conventional chart, but by fixed
stars.*

When the lecture was printed, the sympathetic

•The entire address, which is infinitely worthy of study, may be
found in Mr. Rolleston's Prose Writings of Thomas Davis,

THE THINKEE* 29

Student naturally sent it to the two or three contempo-
rary thinkers who were the most familiar companions
of his solitude. One was Savage Landor, in whose
Imaginary Conversation he found a storehouse of
noble thoughts, though his unbridled temper and rash
spirit had left him shorn of the influence his genius
might have commanded. Landor's reply was found
among Davis's correspondence : —

"Bath, Sunday evening, December 15, 1840.
"Sm,

"I return you many thanks for the honour you
have done mei, in sending me the Address read before
the Historical Society of Dublin.

"I hope it may conduce to the cultivation of the
national mind. Ireland, I forsee, will improve more in
the next fifty years than any other country in Europe,
between steam and Father Mathew.

"That man has done greater good than all the
founders of all the religions in the world within an
equal space of time. I would rather see your country-
men flock round such leaders than expose their heads
to the dangerous flourishes of declamatory demagogues.

"I am, sir,
" Your very obliged and obedient servant,

"W. S. Landob.^'

In John Forster's Life of Landor ^^o, find Davis's
rejoinder, and get a glimpse of the political opinions
which were consolidating into convictions. He had
no personal relations with O'Connell as yet, but he

30 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAYIS-

recognized him as the legitimate successor of the
historical Irishmen whose lives were his favourite
study.

" I am glad to find you have hopes for Ireland. You
have always had a good word and, I am sure, good
wishes for her. If you knew Mr. Mathew you would
relish his simple and downright manners. He is joyous
friendly, and quite imassuming. To have taken away
a degrading and impoverishing vice from the hearts and
habits of three millions of people in a couple of years
seems to justify any praise to !Mr. Mathew, and also to
justify much hope for the people. And suffer me to
say that if you knew the diflBculties under which the
Irish struggle, and the danger from England and from
the Irish oligarchy, you would not regret the power of
the political leaders, or rather Leader, here ; you would
forgive the exciting speeches, and perchance sympathize
with the exertions of men who think that a domestic
Government can alone unite and animate all our people.
Surely the desire of nationality is not ungenerous, nor
is it strange in the Irish (looking to their history) ; nor
considering the population of Ireland, and the nature
and situation of their home, is the expectation of it very
wild.''

He wrote also to Wordsworth, and received a
friendly answer; but this correspondence has been
lost.*

♦ Davis told John O'Hagan that Wordsworth praised the ad-
dress as a composition and as regards many of the sentiments, but
said that it contained " too much insular patriotism." The pam-
phlet was dedicated to the memory of Francis Kearney, one of
his early associates, who was now dead.

THE THIKEEB* 21

The powers of the secluded student were now con-
fessed, and when he found wings it was as natural for
Davis to use them as for a young bird to fly. The
Citizen was under the management of his friends
McCuUagh and Wallis, and the studies which had
occupied his long leisure in college were poured with-
out stint into that barren soil. A youth of constant
study, a manhood in which he pondered over principles
and systems, prepared him to speak with authority on
many questions. It is a strangely touching experi-
ment to turn over these papers to-day, and mark the
care he bestowed upon subjects of the profoundest
national importance, but to which scarcely any one
else gave a thought. Udalism and Feudalism is
a contrast of Norway and Ireland — the one solidly pro-
sperous with a peasant proprietary, the other starving
and desperate with a tenantry at will. In the same
spirit he investigated the constitutional difficulties
which arose in the time of Grattan ; and in a paper on
the natural relation of Irishmen to the Afghans (then
defending their Uberties), opened up views of a foreign
policy suitable to a people in the position of the Irish,
which were afterwards reiterated in the Nation^ and
which a thousand later echoes have rendered common-
place, and at times outrk and extravagant. But the
most solid and valuable of these studies was a later
inquiry into the work done by the maligned Irish Par-

32 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS-

liament of James II. These essays would have helped
to train a generation in the knowledge that makes good
citizens ; but the public mind was still cold and in-
different. In truth, the Celtic temperament is averse
to abstract studies, and will only bend to them under
strict discipline, or when they have become the fuel of
a great passion.

The friends with whom Davis was in the most affec-
tionate and confidential relation at this time, outside
the Citizen circle, were John Blake Dillon, William
Eliot Hudson, and Robert Patrick Webb. Dillon
was a fellow-student of his own age and character,
whom he had encountered at the Historical Society —

" A simple, loyal nature, pure as snow."
Webb was a school-fellow at Mr. Mongan's seminary,
and a constant associate from early days ; a young
man of leisure, culture, and liberal tastes, and, though
of Conservative training and associations, disposed
to follow his friend into new fields. Hudson was
several years the senior of Davis ; a man of sweet,
serene disposition, and singularly unselfish patriotism.
He held the office of Taxing Master in the Four Courts,
and had been associated with O'Loghlen Perrin and
the leading Whig lawyers in reforming the administra-
tion of justice in Ireland. But his leisure and income
were devoted to projects of public usefulness, in which
ambition had no share, for his name was never heard

THE THUfKKR. 33

outside of his own circle. National airs were collected
and published at his cost, and various studies in Celtic
literature promoted, and he bore the burthen of the
Citizen^ which was published at a constant loss, and
contributed from time to time valuable papers in the
region of political science. The maxim which de-
clares that " a man may be known by his friends "
was very applicable to Davis's case j it is only round
such a man that such friends cluster.

CHAPTER III.

THE POLITICIAN. 1841, 1842.

T was in the spring of 1841, early in his
twenty-fifth year, that Davis passed from
speculation to action, and for the first time
took a personal part in promoting the broad
national policy which he had advocated in
the Citizen. In the previous autumn the
Whigs had committed a wanton outrage
on the feelings of Irish gentlemen. To
provide a conspicuous oflEice for a few
weeks for a political gladiator of their
following,* who had grown discontented,
they compelled the greatest orator whom Ireland
had sent to their aid since Edmund Burke to
retire from the Irish Chancellorship, and placed a
Scotch lawyer of hard and vulgar nature at the

* Sir John Campbell, afterwards Lord Campbell.

THE POLinCllK. 35

head of the Irish bar. Davis attended a bar-meeting
of remonstrance, chiefly Whigs of national opinions
who resented the appointment, not as a question
of professional etiquette, but because it tended to
humiliate Ireland. But the remonstrance caused
scarcely a ripple of opinion. The middle class had
tasted patronage and fallen asleep at the feet of the
Whigs, and as O'Connell, who detested Plunket, was
silent, the mass of the people did not know that there
was anything amiss.*

It was in company with Conservatives resisting
another Whig offence that Davis entered on the stage
to do something which attracted universal attention,
because it was something which no other Liberal in
Ireland of that day would have attempted.

The Royal Dublin Society was an institution created
by the Irish Parliament for promoting the useful arts
and sciences, and developing the natural resources of
the country. After the Union, Leinster House, the
palace of the Geraldines, was purchased for its use,
and it received an annual grant of ;^5,5oo to defray

^ * O'Connell is said to have approved of the transaction. It is
manifest from his private correspondence that he did not share
the professional or political heat on the subject. " Blessed be
God, the danger is over ! [defeat of the Government]. I believe
Lord Plunket is about to resign. Campbell will be his suc-
cessor." (O'Connell to P. V. Fitzpatrick, London, April 29,
1839, Private Correspondence of O'Connell, edited by W. J.
Fitzpatrick).

^6 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS-

the cost of its museum, schools of design, botanic
garden, annual exhibition of cattle and agricultural
produce, and occasional exhibitions of native manu-
factures. The lethargy which fell upon Irish enter-
prise after the provincialization of Dublin, was pecu-
liarly felt in literary and scientific institutions, and the
Dublin Society became less and less a school of prac-
tical science and more and more a party club. It
maintained a news-room and lending library for its
members, with a subscription so high as to be nearly
prohibitory to all but the landed gentry. When the
era of reform came with the Whigs, its shortcomings
fell under the review of Parliament, and in 1836 a
select committee reported that, to answer the purpose
for which it was endowed, it must be effectually re-
organized.

Something was done to carry out the orders of
Pariiament, but not much. The high subscription
was maintained, and it continued so exclusively a party
club that the council was taken in a large degree from
the party of Protestant ascendancy. Two or three
years after Catholic Emancipation a minority, who
thought it not too soon to recognize the fact that
religious equality among all classes of Irishmen was
established by law, proposed Dr. Murray, the Arch-
bishop of Dublin, a member of its council. He was a
man who, from the sweetness of his disposition and

THB POLinOTAN. 37

the moderation of his opinions, had made no personal
enemies ; but he was a Catholic and a priest, and the
society rejected him by a large majority. There was
wide and profound indignation, which the Whig
Government, of whom Dr. Murray was an ally, shared,
and the transaction naturally brought the general short-
comings of the society into view. At the close of
1840, when the estimates for the coming year were
in preparation. Lord Morpeth, then Irish Secretary,
reminded the society that the House of Commons
had recommended certain essential reforms which
were not yet effected. He intimated that they must
abandon the political news-room, reduce the annual
fee, and abolish the lending library on which funds
granted for the promotion of science were expended,
and carry out more effectually the instructions of Par-
liament, or the endowment could not be continued. The
council, in reply, contended that they had carried out
the instructions of Parliament as far as was reasonably
practicable; that the news-room was supported, not
out of the endowment, but out of the personal sub-
scriptions of members ; and they insisted that the
arbitrary command issued to them was not justified by
any solid grounds, and was derogatory to the character
of the society as an independent body. A general
meeting of the society approved of this answer by a
majority of 129 to 57. The Government organ, the

38 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS.

Dublin Evening Post^ immediately announced that the
parliamentary grant would be withdrawn.*

In the state of public opinion in Ireland at that
time, nine-tenths of those who called themselves
Reformers, whether Protestants or Catholics, applauded
this coup of the Government. It was an effectual
method of punishing a bigoted coterie, who neglected
the duties for which they were responsible and insulted
a man of the blameless character of Dr. Murray. But
to Davis the question was not one between Catholic
and Protestant, or Liberal and Conservative, but
between Ireland and the Imperial Government. He
was offended by the arbitrary treatment of Irish gentle-
men, and probably hoped that they would understand
they were insulted because they were Irishmen. He
wrote an article, marked by lofty national sentiment
and an open contempt for party feeling on such a
subject ; and Dillon, who had some acquaintance with
the editor of the Mornifig Register^ took it to that
journal. The readers of the Whig Catholic paper,

* An official letter from the Under Secretary confirmed the
news. The society was informed that His Excellency could not
recommend to Parliament any further continuance of the annual
grant. He was, however, ready to receive from the council an
account of any liabilities incurred previous to the receipt of Lord
Morpeth's letter of the 17th of December, which were "essential
to the promotion of the objects of the institution," that he might
consider what sum should be introduced into the estimate of the
present year for their liquidation.

THE POLinCUN. 39

famous for statistics and habitually deferential to the
Castle, must have read next morning with lively sur-
prise an appeal to sentiments of Protestant nationality
long forgotten in Irish controversy.*

" Was this the tone to adopt to a great national hody ?
— ' You are our pensioners, do just as we bid you, with-
out regard to your own opinions or your own conveni-
ence, or we dismiss you.' . . . Was this the treat-
ment due to an institution which had grown old in
serving the interests of Ireland ? Grant that the society
was wrong, yet surely it deserved respect and patience.
It deserved more ; its opinions should not have been dis-
regarded ; its wishes should in some degree have been
yielded to. We ask, Would the French Government
treat a public institution thus? Would the English
treat an English society of old standing, great numbers,
and respectability, thus? No, they dare not. Verily,
we are provincials. This society has existed over one
hundred years ; it contains eight hundred members ; it
maintains a body of professors of arts and sciences ; it
has schools, theoretical and practical,^ for teaching ; the
agriculture, the manufactures, the science,, the Uterature
of Ireland, have been served by it ; and now it is to be
flung aside at the caprice of an English Government.
We remember well that the society did, on one remark-
able occasion, richly deserve the charge of having acted
factiously. A venerated prelate, who united all that
endears the man with all that ennobles the pubHc
character, was rejected from political, or worse, from
sectarian feeling. We were not behind in censuring
them ; but we deny that there is any connection be-

* Dublin Morning Register, Feb. 2, 1841,-

40 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS.

tween that step and this ; neither the same men nor
the same motives have influenced the society now."

The Castle press was bewildered by sentiments so
unprecendented. A Liberal journal, complaisant to
the Castle, and perhaps under obligations to official
persons, resisting the will of the Government ! It was
unheard of; a base motive was the only one intelligible
to the official journalist, and he affirmed that the pro-
prietor of the Register must have been betrayed in his
absence by some untrustworthy representative.

Mr. Conway — this was the name of the Castle journa-
list— scoffed at the idea of Tory nationality ; but Davis
knew that Irish patriotism had been constantly re-
cruited from the ranks of its hereditary enemies. Its
greatest spokesmen for a century were sons of Govern-
ment officials, while in every generation the sons of
historical and tribunitial houses had passed over to the
enemy, or silently relinquished the opinions which
made their ancestors illustrious. He was persuaded
that it only needed a Swift or a Grattan to revive the
Protestant nationality of old.

Dillon next day restated the grounds on which the
society was defended.

The society was saved, and the sympathetic reader
may mark that this transaction presents a key-note to
Davis's entire career.

The friends felt that they had got an opening to the

THB POLinCIAK. 4 1

mind of the country which ought not to be lightly re-
linquished, and they resolved to propose a more per-
manent arrangement to Mr. Staunton. The result was
that the two young men were placed in control of the
Register^ for a limited period, and strictly as an ex-
periment. Since a national press existed in Ireland it
was never so low in character and ability as at that
time. The popular journals echoed the speeches of
O'Connell, but rarely supplemented them by any in-
dividual thought or investigation. One nowhere en-
countered the convictions and purpose of an indepen-
dent man. The journalists at this time worked for
the most part with the lethargy of men who believed
little and hoped nothing. Thomas Moore summed up
the case : " Look," he said, "at the Irish papers. The
country in convulsion — people's lives, fortunes, and
religion at stake, and not a gleam of talent from one
year's end to the other." But though the press was
feeble it was often malicious, like a torpid viper, it
awoke at times to inflict a sting.

National literature in a higher sense than journalism,
like all our native institutions, had emigrated to England.
The poet who, in the eyes of Europe, typified the Irish
race vegetated in Devonshire; The novelist who
aimed to win for the annals of Scotia Major the interest
with which Scott had invested the annals of Scotia
Minor was fagging for London booksellers. The

42 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS-

young man of genius who had produced the most
original drama of the generation, and a novel which
more than one of his rivals has pronounced to be the
best Irish story ever written, was starving in a London
garret because he could not get even the employment
of a hack. Lady Morgan, after attempting for a time
to sustain a national saion in Dublin, followed the tide
and established herself in Mayfair. Maxwell was still
labouring, nearly as unsuccessfully as Maturin had
laboured before him, to attract an audience to pure
literature flavoured with a dash of Irish eccentricity ;
and Mag nn and Mahony, both intensely Irish in
nature and gifts, exhibited their nationality chiefly in
bitter gibes at O'Connell and the Repealers. The
Irish Fenny Magatine^ in which Petrie and O'Donovan
had revived for a time the study of Irish antiquities,
was dead. A Dublin Penny Journal^ owned by a
Scotch firm, followed, but did not succeed it. The
Citizen was little read, and, except for occasional his-
torical papers, was not worth reading. The Dublin
University Magatine alone maintained the reputation
of Irish genius, but it was more habitually Ubellous of
the Irish people than the Times. The stories of
Carleton and LeFanu, the poetry and criticism of
Mangan and Anster, the graphic sketches of Caesar
Otway, and the sympathetic essays of Samuel Ferguson
were smothered in masses of furious bigotry manu-

THH TOLmOlAK' 43

factored chiefly by Samuel O'Sullivan, a parson who
had once been a papist, and brought to his new
connection the zeal of a convertite. His brother,
Mortimer O'Sullivan, a man of notable ability, was
also a contributor, but rarely fell into the monotony of
hysterics which distinguished his junior. The voice of
Irish Ireland was heard nowhere but in the speeches
of O'Connell, and his position and antecedents made
him less the national than the Cathohc champion.

The young men wrote constantly in the Register on
foreign politics, and national organization ; and, for
the first time since the corpse of Robert Emmet was
flung into the mud of Bullysacre, a perfectly genuine
appeal was made to Protestant nationality. The first
fate of new truths is to be ridiculed, and the country
was then in no humour to be schooled in the sterner
virtues. Corrupted by the Whigs, who had kindled
the lust of place in a million of hearts — from the
popular member who wanted a sinecure, to the young
peasant who wanted to be a policeman, — the new
principles made no way. The ordinary clientele of the
Register did not understand them j and to gather new
readers around a long-established paper, with a fixed
reputation for respectable mediocrity, was a dishearten-
ing and nearly impossible task. The prejudice to be
assailed was peculiarly intractable. Irish Protestants
might well be ashamed of the wrongs they permitted

44 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS-

and battened upon, but most of them only saw their
country through a haze of traditional prejudice. A
pane of coloured glass alters the eternal facts of nature,
her grass is no longer green or her skies blue, and their
prejudice was a coloured glass through which all nature
looked orange and purple. The experiment was to
last for three months certain, and then be reconsidered.
Mr. Staunton, who was hard and parsimonious, but
strictly honest in business transactions, reported, when
the time came, that it had not succeeded. In July he
wrote to Davis.

" My dbae See,

" Our agreement was made on the 5th of March,
and, according to my reckoning, you were engaged six-
teen weeks subsequently to that date. You are there-
fore entitled to £32, for which I enclose a draft. There
is, I am sorry to say, no dividend to be computed, our
condition having been the opposite of one in advance.

" Yours very truly,

" Mich. Staunton.*
" Thomas Davis, Esq.*'

We constantly expect from a gifted man qualities
which he does not possess. Davis was a great jour-
nalist ; he might have become a great orator ; he did,
after a little, become a great poet ; but he never ex-
hibited the practical faculty which makes circumstances

* 8o Marlborough Street, July 24th.

THE POLinOIAN. 45

its submissive agents. The Citizen^ into which he
poured the treasures of his mind, attracted no national
interest ; and the Register^ while he poured political
philosophy and national spirit into its leadmg columns,
was, from title-page to tail-piece, merely a respectable
Government utensil. The men in Ireland at that era
who possessed the practical faculty in the greatest per-
fection were O'Connell and Thomas Drummond, but
both of them wanted some of Davis's higher spiritual
gifts.

The two friends immediately retired from the
Register^ and employed themselves in other public
work. They had found work by this time, destined to
engross the remainder of their lives. While writing in
the Register it became plain that their position as
national journalists, standing outside of the national
organization which O'Connell had recently re-estab-
lished at the Com Exchange, was weak and anomalous.
The philosophical nationality of the University was a
feeble fire at best, and it was certain that it would
only spread slowly and probably not very far. On
the other hand, the popular agitation naturally repelled
a young man like Davis, bred among a class to whom
it was hateful and contemptible. For its methods
were of necessity coarse, its instruments rude, and the
one conspicuous man of genius who gave it its sole
authority was the living embodiment of political and

46 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS.

religious passions inherited from former contests. But,
however imperfectly it fulfilled its office, it was the only
guardian of the national cause, and that cause was the
cause of justice. The result of reflection was that, to
accomplish his purpose, he must do what Tone had
done before him — he must associate himself with the
Catholic people and their trusted leaders. The most
courageous incident in Davis's career, which would
not have been surpassed in daring if he had mounted
a breach in promotion of his opinions, was to enter
the Corn Exchange and announce himself a follower
of Daniel O'Connell.

It is difficult at the close of the nineteenth century,
after fifty years of agitation for national ends in which
Protestants have been leaders or conspicuous spokes-
men, to understand what such a decision meant in
1842. The son of a Roman centurion who left the
retinue of Caesar to associate with the obscure Hebrews
gathered round Saul of Tarsus scarcely made a more
surprising or significant choice. A dozen years had
barely elapsed since the Celtic population were released
from a code expressly framed for their extinction,
so that "one Papist should not remain in Ireland."
The bulk of the nation were simple, generous, and
pious, but ignorant, and little accustomed to think for
themselves. The middle-class Catholics scarcely
dreamed of any higher aim than to obtain some social

THE POLITICIAN. 47

recognition from the dominant race, or some crumb
of patronage from a friendly Administration,

We have glanced at the Ireland into which Davis
was bom in 1814. The generation which had since
elapsed saw political changes accomplished of great
scope and promise — Catholics were emancipated and
ParUament was reformed, — but the system on which
Ireland was governed by England had undergone no
substantial change. Every institution and agency per-
taining to authority was still strictly Protestant. The
towns were only a few months liberated from exclusive
corporations who had vindicated their right to govern
by plundering in every instance the endowments pro-
vided by the State for their support. The counties
were controlled (as they are still controlled) by
Protestant grand juries, in whose selection the rate-
payers whose money they expended had no part. The
judiciary, executive, and local magistracy were Pro-
testant in the proportion of more than a hundred to
one, and they commonly regarded the people with
distrust and aversion ; for though time had mitigated,
it had not extinguished the sentiment which in official
circles classified the bulk of the nation as the " Irish
enemy." Half the rural population were steeped in
habitual misery. The peasantry in the genial cUmate
of southern Europe were better clad and fenced against
the elements than the tenant farmers who toiled under

48 SHORT LIFE OF THOMAS DAVIS.

the moist and chilly sky of winter in Ireland ; and in
the least productive countries in Europe, in the
barrenest canton of Switzerland, or the most sterile
commune in the Alps, they were better fed than
amongst the plentiful harvests of Munster. The great
estates were held by English absentees, who ruled the
country from Westminster, mainly for their own profit
and security. The resident gentry were for the most
part their dependents or adherents, and had never
wholly lost the secret apprehension that estates ob-
tained by confiscation might in the end be forfeited by
the same process. But they were entrenched behind
a standing army whose function in Dublin was no
more in doubt than that of the Croat in Milan or the
Cossack in Warsaw. The country sent a few national
and a few Catholic representatives to the Imperial
Parliament, but the franchise was so skilfully adjusted
to exclude the majority that in Dublin a citizen with
the required qualification had sometimes to pay as
many as ten separate rates and taxes before he became
entitled to vote. The one powerful tribune, indeed,
constantly demanded in Parliament and on the popular
platform the rights withheld from the people ; but his
enemies scornfully declared that he did not represent
the nation, but only its frieze coats and soutanes. He
had against him, for the most part, the Irishmen whose
books were read or whose lives were notable, the

THE POLinCUN. 49

journalists capable of controlling public opinion, and,
universally, the great social power called good society.
His agitation was pronounced to be plebeian ; and, in
truth, it was not free from faults of exaggeration,
offensive to veracity and good taste. For nearly two
years O'Connell, at this time, had been making weekly
appeals to public opinion in favour of a native Parlia-
ment, but he had not drawn to his side one man of
station, weight of character, or conspicuous ability.
The sincerity of his policy was doubted even among
the patriot party, because he impaired the simple force
of the national claim by coupling with it a radical
reform of the House of Commons, revision of the land
code, and the abolition of tithe, — questions to be dealt
with by the Imperial Parliament, and each " good for
a Trojan war of agitation."

Between the agitator and the Government there
stood a section of the Protestant middle-class, of
humane culture and liberal opimons, who sympathised
with neither, unless when the administration was in
the hands of Whigs. They had been Emancipators,
and wished to see gross wrongs redressed ; but they
were content that reforms should come as soon, and
extend as far, as English opinion might approve — ^un-
happily never very soon or very far. They were, in
fact, merely the provincial allies of a political party in

London.

£

50 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS-

The Tories, who were in a great majority among
the gentry and the professions, looked on the popular
movement with disdain. But the indolence and
satiety which come of long possession leavened their
scorn largely with a languid contempt. Between these
parties Davis, if he took any part in public affairs, felt
he had no choice. He recognized in O' Conn ell the
natural successor of Hugh O'Neil, Art MacMurragh,
Owen Roe, and the other Celtic soldiers who had
stood in the front of the nation in peril and calamity.
No one saw more clearly that the leader was not free
from faults — it is only in poetry and romance that one
encounters blameless heroes ; but his cause was the
same as theirs, the deliverance of the Irish race from
greedy and truculent oppression. Among the class
whom Davis burned to enlist in the national move-
ment, O'Connell had never stood so low as at this
lime. He had laid himself open to a suspicion hostile
to his influence among men of public spirit. Little
more than half a dozen years earlier he had pulled
down the banner of nationality, in order to grasp the
patronage of the Irish Government, and they believed
that if the Whigs came back to power he would yield
again to the same temptation. He could doubtless
plead in defence that he had brought into power the
Irish administration of Mulgrave and Drummond, and
raised O'Loghlen and Woulfe to the bench.

THE POLinCUN. 51

In 1840 the Government which he supported fell
from power, and he immediately took up the national
question anew.

But he was impeded at every step by inevitable sus-
picions ; the majority of the nation answered languidly
to his appeal, and the minority did not answer at all.

This was a country in which a public career offered
no prizes to ambition, but nowhere on the earth was
a noble, unselfish patriotism more imperiously solicited
to struggle and die rather than endure wrongs so
shameless. The patriotism of the two young men was
not solicited in vain; on the 19th of April, 1841,
Davis and Dillon became members of the Repeal
Association. They were cordially welcomed by
O'Connell, and immediately placed on the General
Committee, which was the popular privy council, and
on sub-committees charged with special duties. How
they demeaned themselves there I shall describe more
conveniently a little later, when I became their asso-
ciate.

They were assiduous in their attendance on com-
mittees, but they did not limit their labours for the
national cause to one field. Davis continued his con-
tributions to the Citizen — now become the Dublin
Monthly Magazine ; and Dillon, who had succeeded
to the auditorship of the Historical Society, prepared
the closing address for the year 1841.

52 SHORT LIPH OF THOMAS DAVIS.

Dillon's address followed the general line of his
friend's in teaching public duties, rather than rules of
art ; but it was calmer and statelier in tone. Nearly
devoid of ornament, it was eloquent with strong con-
victions and lucid principles. It was an appeal to the
judgment and conscience rather than to the generous
emotions. But it was persuasive in a singular degree.
One of the most eminent judges in Ireland* told me a
fact which enables us to estimate its value better than
much criticism. '* The night before 1 read Dillon's
address," he said, " I was a Whig ; next morning and
ever after I was a Nationalist." Dillon was so closely
associated with Davis, so intimate a confederate and
counsellor throughout his career, that I must pause for
a moment on the Catholic Nationalist's first confession
of faith as an essential part of the new opinions which
they brought into Irish affairs.

If the Historical Society were solely a school of
eloquence (he told them) the greatest lesson it could
teach was that the way to be eloquent was, not to
study the tricks of rhetoric, but to cultivate the pas-
sions of which eloquence is the natural language. It
was usual on occasions like that to praise the care and
perseverance of Demosthenes in mastering the art, but
it would be more to the purpose to recall " the great

* The late Judge O'Hagan.

THE POLITIOIAN. 53

passions by which he was inspired ; the ardent love he
bore his country ; his fear for her safety ; his undying
hatred of her foe ; and his fierce indignation against
the traitors to her cause."

And history everywhere repeated the same lesson.

" Look," he said, *' to the records of any nation, and
inquire what ia that period of its history when eloquence
shone forth in the greatest splendour ? You will find it
to be, when great events were being enacted, and great
interests in conflict, and great and stormy passions roused
in the breaets of men. Compare France in the Revolu-
tion with France ten years before, and ask the cause of
the change which that short period brought about in the
genius of its people? You will find that it was not be-
cause they were more accomplished rhetoricians, that the
men of the Revolution were greater orators than those
who went before them, but because of the bursting forth
of new passions, and the diffusion from breast to breast
of high and fierce desires. And when Henry, the De-
mosthenes of America, issued from the recesses of the
forest, and summoned his countrymen to arms, with an
eloquence as deep, and as strong, and as rapid, as the
rivers of his native wild, whence did he draw his in-
spiration? Was it from the pages of Longinus, or
Quinctilian, or Blair? or was it not rather from the
tumultuous emotions that heaved within Tiim ? He loved
his country ; he saw it in danger ; and passion touched
his heart, and its fountains opened, and the sacred
stream gushed forth unsolicited and free."

He spoke of the examples which our own history fur-
nish ; and drew from them lessons new to his audience,
but which time has made our common property.

54 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS.

" We are apt, when we contemplate such a rare coUe-
tion of great men as the Irish Parliament at that time
exhibited, to attribute to them the greatness of those
events which occurred in their time. I would be in-
clined to reverse this arrangement, and to place the
greatness of the time the first, and the greatness of
the men the second, in the order of causation Great
orators they were, no doubt — amongst the greatest the
world ever saw ; but I do not think they deserve to
be classed amongst the greatest men. As men, their
greatness should be judged, not from what they said,
but what they did ; and, judged by this test, they are
found wanting. Their language abounds in great con-
ceptions ; but in their actions we seek in vain for that
lofty determination which marks the conduct of the
truly great — the Hampdens, the Washingtons, and many
a countryman of our own, whoee name is now forgotten,
or preserved by lying history as an object of ridicule
and scorn. At a time when they had the enemy com-
pletely at their mercy, and might have dictated what-
ever terms they pleased, they should have insisted on
something more than permission to meet and amuse one
another with elaborate orations, and to make laws which
they had no power to enforce."

He warned them against the modern cosmopoli-
tanism which taught that nationality was a prejudice;
that one spot on earth, because we chanced to be bom
there, was not on that account to be preferred to
another, and that we had no duties to perform to our
mother country. The ravages of pestilence and
famine were soon repaired, and fields laid waste soon
grew green again; but when cold and grovelling

THE POLrnCIAN. 55

selfishness took possession of the minds of a people
and drew them away from virtue and honour, there
was then a wound inflicted which festered at the heart,
and which centuries might not heal.

He spoke of the blessings patriotism conferred, and
the sacrifices it entailed, and it lends a noble charm to
the sentiment of the young man to remember that in
later times when called upon to put the sentiment into
action he did not fail.

Students familiar with the ante-revolution literature
of France and America will note that Davis's address
belonged to the first, Dillon's to the second school.
The one suggests the passion of Vergniaud, the other
the stately strength of Patrick Henry or the serene
philosophy of Alexander Hamilton. Davis's address
was like a vivid stream rippling musically over impedi-
ments, and leaping into cascades, sometimes sparkling
in the sun, sometimes diving into subterranean places,
and reappearing coloured with the veined soil through
which it forced its way. Dillon's was like a calm,
strong level river, whose force may be measured by
the unbroken rapidity of its course.

The adhesion of Davis and Dillon to the popular
movement is a memorable event to Irishmen. There
are men who make epochs in our history. Lorian
O'Thuail, who combined the Celtic tribes against the
invader; Art McMurrough, who effaced the crimes

56 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS.

of his ancestors by heroic services ; Hugh O'Neill, who
baffled the enemy by culture and policy, learned in
their own camp and court; Roger O'Moore, who
evoked hope among a moribund people ; Sarsfield,
who restored to their imagination the figure of a
national soldier ; Grattan, who used the institutions
of the conquerors to conquer them in turn ; Wolfe
Tone, who combined the Presbyterian Republicans
of the North with the Catholic serfs of Munster;
O'Connell, who taught the trampled multitude their
own strength ; and Davis, who once again aimed to
unite the whole force of the nation in honourable
union, are such men. He was the first Protestant
since Tone who not only sympathized with the wrongs
of the Celts, but accepted and embraced the whole
volume of their hopes and sympathies. He was not
a patron of the old race, but its spokesman and

brother.

It was at this time, in the autumn of 1841, that I
made Davis's acquaintance at the Repeal Association,
and Dillon's at the Register office, where I had pre-
ceded him in an apprenticeship to journalism. I was
in town only for a few days, to keep terms as a law
student, and had no opportunity of cultivating their
acquamtance before returning to Belfast, where I then
edited a bi-weekly newspaper. But they were so
unlike all I had previously seen of Irish journalists

THE POLinCIAK. 57

that I was eager to know more of them. On return-
ing to Dublin in the spring of 1842, I met them in
the hall of the Four Courts, and they put off their
gowns and walked out with me to the Phoenix Park,
to have a frank talk about Irish affairs. We soon
found that our purpose was the same — to raise up
Ireland morally, socially, and politically, and put the
sceptre of self-government into her hands. I knew
their connection with the Register had ceased, and
that the Citizen had no audience or influence in the
country, and I proposed that we should establish and
conduct a weekly paper as organ of the opinions we
held in common. Sitting under a noble elm in the
park, facing Kilmainham, we debated the project,
and agreed on the general plan. I was to find the
funds and undertake the editorship, and we were to
recruit contributors among our friends. Davis could
count upon John Cornelius O'Callaghan, whose
Green Book* was attracting attention at that
time; Dillon named two young men in College,
who afterwards did valuable work — John O'Hagan
and John Pigot; and I could promise for Clarence

•In 1 84 1 appeared The Green Book; or^ Gleanings from
the Writing Desk of a Literary Agitator:^' a miscellany of
poetry ; the notes, valuable historical studies ; the verses, rather
slipshod, being more than ten years older than the establishment
of the Nation, and belonging to quite a different school.

58 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS.

Mangan and T. M. Hughes,* who both contributed to
the provincial journal I was then editing, and O'Neill
Daunt (formerly O'Connell's private secretary), whom
I had sounded on the subject. We separated on an
agreement to meet again in summer, and launch the
journal in autumn.

Davis's correspondence during his early connec-
tion with the Repeal Association exhibits him con-
stantly engrossed in work.

" I am a brute (he wrote to his friend P. R. Webb)
for not having written to you before. After that admis-
sion you must forgive me. I envy you your leisure, and
your country, and your thoughts. I am up to the tips
of my hair in business. I am secretary to the Franchise
Committee, ditto to the Municipal Election Committee,
and, on account of Clement's illness, I am obliged to
give some of my time to the Dublin Registry, which is
now going on. There is no hope of my getting out of
this ' decayed metropolis ' for the summer, or autumn
either "

" Are you getting more passionately patriotic ? You
are away from poor Ireland. Poor, poor Ireland ! Well,
who knows ? ' Old Erin shall be free,' says the ' Shan
Van Vocht.' Have you made as much way in De
Beaumont as in walking? [Davis gave him De Beau-
mont's 'Irelande Sociale, Politique, et Religieuse' to
study.] "

"O'Callaghan is in London, staggering with Parisian

* Afterwards author of Revelations of Spain, the Ocean
Flower y etc., and editor of the London Charivari a periodical
which preceded Punchy and was illustrated by Leech.

THE POLITICIAN. 59

lore, Hig book is beginning to sell, and mil be
noticed in the DimLiN Review next month. Do you
know Mackintosh's letters to R. Hall about his madness ?
Do you know Mackintosh's life? or anything? I only
just read it myself, but I can swagger judiciously."*

** You will be glad to hear that O'Connell will (he
says) hare a book on Irish History from 1172 to 1612
(when the Irish were made not-outlaws) published
in October. It will consist of some thirty pages of text,
and seven or eight hundred of notes and illustrations,
including most of Carey^s book to that date. [Carey's
" Vindicse Hibemicse," a defence of the Irish rising of
1641.] O'Connell 's name will get all these collections read,
and the memory of Ireland will be enlarged. We may
all take advantage of this beginning, and put thoughts
into the mind of the ooimtry. By heavens, 'tis mad-
dening to see the land without arts or arms, literature
or wealth ! I am for the sharp remedies. Do you feel
any necessity for a creed to satisfy your feelings? Un-
less one has something of the sort he is apt to grow
inactive and uncomfortable. A. strong mind must preach
or govern or love, a mission or occupation, or a para-
dise. I must choose between the two first, but I waver
and grow sensual and misty (for mine is not a strong
mind), so shall probably end in doing neither. "■[■

After our general design for the new journal was
settled, Davis proposed modifications to which his
colleagues could not cordially assent He feared
that a weekly paper spoke too seldom to be an
eflfective teacher. The Evening Freeman^ an un-

* 6i Bagot Street, September 28, 1841.

t 61 Bagot Street, Sunday, August 15, 184 1.

6o SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS.

prosperous offshot of the morning paper which
appeared twice a week, was understood to be in the
market, and he suggested that we should farm it
for a fixed period, and be heard twice a week instead
of once. I was unwilling to make this experiment,
a weekly journal was my ideal. One of my first
purchases with money of my own earning had been
a set of the Examiner in the time of Hazlitt and the
Hunts. A paper like the Examiner in its best days,
— different in form as well as in spirit from the
existing weeklies, original instead of a reprint, and
literary quite as much as political — seemed to me the
fit medium for criticism and speculation. After much
debate it was suggested, probably by Dillon, that
we might try both projects simultaneously. Happily
the division of forces which the double task would
have imposed was avoided by the refusal of the
Freeman proprietary to accept the arrangement.
They shortly afterwards purchased the Morning
Register, in which Davis and Dillon had recently
written, amalgamated it with their daily paper, and the
unprofitable Evening Freeman slipped quietly out of
existence.

But Davis had not yet reconciled himself to the
limitations of a weekly paper. And his college
friends, Wallis especially, were angrily opposed to
any political journal, which, they insisted, must fall

THE POLITICIAN. 6 1

under the dictatorship of O'Connell, and lose all
initiative and independence. The Dublin Monthly
Magazine^ (so the Citizen was now named) if it
were only strengthened by the men and money about
to be wasted on a weekly paper, would, they con-
tended, do the work designed more eflfectually— the
work being, to create a sounder and more generous
opinion on all branches of the Irish question, and
cultivate the sympathy of Protestants. On the other
hand, if its best men were diverted to other projects,
the only organ of high nationality in the country
must perish.

Objections to a periodical, because it only appeared
once a month, were futile ; was there not a periodical
in Edinburgh, which appeared only once a quarter,
which had saved the fortunes of the Whig party, and
won the mind of England to Reform ? If such things
could be done in Edinburgh, why not in Dublin?
These were the arguments pressed upon Davis,
especially by Wallis, whom he was accustomed to hear
with deference.

When the plan was submitted to me I declined to
waste an hour or a shilling on the Citizen which was
moribund, kept from perishing only by the generosity
of Hudson. It would be a fatal blunder to put our
new wine into this damaged vehicle. A weekly paper
would reach classes who never opened a magazine or

62 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS.

review. And there was no reason why its teaching
should not be as original and effective as if it were
issued only once a month. At any rate after the
length we had gone retreat was impossible ; the new
paper must be published coi^te que coHte. Davis agreed
that retreat was impossible, but he asked me to con-
sider whether the amount of assistance he could give
me under the circumstances would be worth retaining.
When he asked the advice of Dillon, then in the
country, his vigorous good sense rejected the project
as peremptorily as I had done.

''Deae Davis (he wrote) — Although I received your
letter two days since it was quite impossible for me to
answer it sooner. I have been unable to do anything,
or even to think of anything since I came to the
country from the st-ate of perpetual motion in which I
have been kept. In compliance with your request for a
categorical answer to your proposal, I say ' No.' I
need hardly tell you that nothing would give me greater
pleasure than to make one of those of whom your club
will consist, if you succeed in establishing it ; but with
my present opinions regarding its principal object, it
would argue a great want of common prudence in me
to join it.

" You must not understand me to mean that it is not
desirable that the Citizen should jBourish. I have not
as you are aware, so high an opinion of the utility of
a monthly periodical for this country as others have ;
but, at the same time, I think it would be by no
means without use if it could succeed. But is your
project likely to insure it success ? I see no reason to

THE POLITICIAN. 63

think 60. It is now two or three years in existence,
and it is still a losing speculation ; and what chance is
there that it will not be the same to the end of the
next three years ? What advantage will it have that it
has not had? I cannot see any, and I think it a pity
that the energies of the best men in the country should
be wasted in an occupation neither proj&table to them-
selves nor to anyone else; for you know a magazine
which does not pay is not read. Under these circum-
stances, if you engage in the undertaking, I must be
content with wishing you success.

" As to the prospectus [of the Nation], it was my
intention (and unfortunately, like most of my intentions,
it still remains unfulfilled) to write one, and to send it
with yours to Duffy. This is the reason why I have
kept yours so long. I do not altogether approve of the
one you wrote. It contains many good passages ; but,
as a whole, I think it would not answer the purpose
for which it was intended. I have taken a copy for
Duffy, which I will send him immediately. The original
I send back to yourself, as you might wish to improve
it. It would be highly desirable to have a good pros-
pectus, and you have done first-rate things in that way.

"Have you seen Duffy's letter in the Yindicatoe?
It struck me as a first-rate production. A weekly paper
conducted by that fellow would be an invaluable acquisi-
tion. I should like to hear when you intend to leave
town, and how you are succeeding in the club affair.

"Ever yours,

"John Dillon."*

* Dillon's letter has no date ; but the letter in the Vindicatort
to which he alludes as recent, is dated June 23, 1842.

64 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS-

Alter Dillon's letter, Davis began to speak to his
friends of the new journal. He still helped the
Dublin Monthly with important papers, and urged
old contributors to help it, but the project of re-
organizing it was silently abandoned.

Early in July he wrote to Maddyn : —

" Webb and I leave for the north on Tuesday next.
After seeing the County Down, Belfast and Benburb,
we mean to loiter round Antrim cliffs to Derry, and
maybe to Donegal ; and from either I shall return by
the Fermanagh Lakes to Dublin, leaving him to close
the autumn in the north with his wife and his little
ones — God bless them ! Webb is always asking for
you, and what can I say? I am going to take another
dash at the press, but under better auspices than last
time. K you write to me at any time before the 25th,
care of C. G. Duffy, Esq., Yindicatob Oflace, Belfast,
ril get the letter."

On his northern journey Davis opened his heart to
his friend on his policy and hopes.

"The machinery at present working for repeal could
never, under circumstances like the present, achieve it ;
but circumstances must change. Within ten or fifteen
years England must be in peril. Assiuning this much,
I argue thus. Modem Anglicism — i.e.^ Utilitarianism,
the creed of Russell and Peel, as well as of the Radicals
— this thing, call it Yankeeism or Englishism, which
measures prosperity by exchangeable value, measures
duty by gain, and limits desire to clothes, food, and
respectability — this damned thing has come into Ireland
imder the Whigs, and is equally the favourite of the

THE POLITICIAN. 6$

' Peel ' Tories. It is "believed in the political assemblies
in our cities, preached from our pulpits (always Utili-
tarian or persecuting) ; it is the very Apostles* Creed
of the professions, and threatens to corrupt the lower
classes, who are still faithful and romantic. To use
every literary and political engine against this seems to
me the first duty of an Irish patriot who can foresee
consequences. Believe me, this is a greater though not
80 obvious a danger as Papal supremacy. So much worse
do I think it, that, sooner than suffer the iron gates
of that filthy dimgeon to close on us, I would submit
to the certainty of a Papal supremacy, knowing that
the latter should end in some twenty years — ^leaving the
people mad, it might be, but not sensual and mean.
Much more willingly would I take the chance of a
Papal supremacy, which even a few of us laymen could
check, shake, and prepare (if not effect) the ruin of.
Still more willingly would I (if Anglicanism, r.^., Sen-
sualism, were the alternative) take the hazard of open
war, sure that if we succeeded the military leaders would
compel the bigots down, estabhsh a thoroughly national
Grovemment, and one whose policy, somewhat arbitrary,
would be anti- Anglican and anti-sensual ; and if we
failed it would be in our power before dying to throw
up huge barriers against English vices, and, dying, to
leave example and a religion to the next age."

In July, Davis visited me at Belfast, and all the
preliminaries were settled for the issue of our pro-
spectus, Davis's draft was adopted with a single
amendment, and an addition which I considered of
the highest practical importance; the names of the
intending contributors were to be published as a
guarantee of good faith and personal responsibility.

66 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS-

Davis suggested the significant title of the Nation for
the new paper, and a sentence from the prospectus
will indicate our specific aim : —

" Nationality is their first great object— a Nationality
which will not only raise our people from their poverty,
by securing to them the blessings of a Domestic
Legislatthe, but inflame and purify them with a lofty
and heroic love of country — ^a Nationality of the spirit
as well as the letter — a Nationality which may come to
be stamped upon our manners, and literature, and our
deeds — a nationality which may embrace Protestant,
Catholic, and Dissenter — Milesian and Cromwellian —
the Irishman of a hundred generations and the stranger
■who is within our gates ; — not a Nationality which
would prelude civil war, but which would establish
internal union and external independence ; a Nation-
ality which would be recognised by the world, and
sanctified by wisdom, virtue, and prudence."

The Belfast of the United Irishmen and the
Volunteers, which still claimed to be the chief seat of
liberality and letters in the island, had a strong
fascination for Davis, but I warned him that he would
find the " Athens of Ireland " as ugly and sordid as
Manchester; its temples hideous Little Bethels,
where Pentilic marble was replaced by unwholesome
bricks from the mud of the I»agan, its orators noisy
fanatics, and the old historic spirit soured into bigotry
worthy of Rochelle, the Belfast of France. To my
northern friends Davis was a new and puzzling
phenomenon. The Belfast Whigs were Protestant

THE POLITICIAN. 67

Liberals, in general sympathy with the English Whigs,
but a genuine Nationalist was nearly unknown among
them. The Catholic Bishop and clergy to whom I
presented my friend saw for the first time an Irish
Protestant who recognized the old race as the natural
spokesmen of public opinion, who sympathized
passionately with the historic memories of which they
were proud, but never forgot or permitted others to
forget that the Protestant minority were equally
Irishmen, however party politics might have separated
them from their brethren.

Though his apprenticeship ended and his pubhc
life began when he entered the Repeal Association, it
was only in the new journal Davis was free to utter
his whole mind and able to make himself heard by the
nation. His public life lasted barely five years, and
seldom in the history of a people have five years been
more fruitful of beneficent changes in opinion and
action. The story I have to tell is not so much the
career of a gifted man as the development of a new
era. It is more than half a century since he entered
the Corn Exchange ; it is over eight and forty years
since he was buried at Mount Jerome ; and during all
this interval the opinions which he taught have been
widening their scope, and his name growing dearer to
his countrymen. He influenced profoundly the mind
of his own generation, and it is not too soon to affirm

68

SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS-

that he has made a permanent change in the convictions
of the nation which he served.

From this date all the incidents of his career are
familiar to a hundred witnesses, and pass before us
like a panorama.

CHAPTER IV.

THE JOURNALIST. 1 842.

HE new journal was an-
nounced to appear on the
8th of October, 1842.
Davis had only undertaken
to write one article a week,
and he arrived in town from
his northern excursion on the eve of publication.*
But he speedily came to see that he had found the
true business of his life, and he entered on it with all
the decision and energy of his nature. The public
were on the alert for the appearance of the Nation.

* I found this note among his papers : " I have been ex-
pecting you in town for some days. Our first number must
make its appearance to-morrow fortnight, and there are many
questions to be considered, which will require time and you.
Pray come home " (Duffy to Davis, Sept. 23, 1842).

70 SHORT LIFE OF THOMAS DAVIS-

The prospectus and the disclosure of the writers'
names had awakened a certain curiosity, and there
was already at the publishing office a considerable list
of subscribers, and large orders for the first number
from country agents. The two earliest subscribers
were symbolical — men who took slight interest in
current journalism, but much in native literature — the
eminent antiquaries, Eugene Curry and John O'Dono
van. But the existing journalists, as I encountered
them from time to time, warned me, in spite of these
omens, to expect a collapse. We are apt to think of
an eminent man as having been to his contemporaries
all he has become to posterity, but this rarely happens ;
and it will be an encouragement to modest men to
know that it was far from happening to Uavis. Since
he began to act in public, he was the subject of con-
temptuous banter to the veteran agitators around
O'Connell. He spoke a language which they did not
understand, and pursued aims which they believed to
be quixotic. The jolly unprincipled editor of the
Pilot, understood to be much in the confidence of
O'Connell, assured me that Davis was a simpleton
who nearly ruined Alderman Staunton by eccentric
proposals in the Register^ and might be counted on
to frighten men of sense from any enterprise in which
he was concerned. And the proprietor of the Monitor^
who had no vialus ani7?ius^ told me that he had seen

THa JOURNALIST. 7^

Davis representing the Repeal Association in the
Dublin Revision Court, and that he was unskilful and
unready, ignorant of practice which had become tradi-
tional, and incapable of holding his own with the
Conservative agent. He might be able to write, but
he certainly was not able to act.

On the 15th of October the long-expected first
number was issued. Maddyn had suggested a happy
motto from a speech of Stephen Woulfe, " To create
and foster public opinion, and make it racy of the
soil." The form and appearance of the journal were
new in Ireland ; political verses were printed among
the leading articles as claiming equal attention, and
there was a distinct department for literature. The
first leader declared, as the chief article of our creed,
that, political nicknames— Whig, Tory, and so forth
notwithstanding,— we would recognize only two
parties in Ireland — those who suffered by her degrada-
tion, and those who profited by it. Clarence Mangan
proclaimed our second purpose to be the emancipa-
tion of the trampled tenantry.

" We announce a Kew Era — be this our first news —
When the serf-grinding landlords shall shake in their

shoes,
When the ark of a bloodless and mighty Reform
Shall emerge from the flood of the popular storm !
Well we know how the Uckspittle panders to po\7'r
Feel and fear the approach of that death-dealing hour ;

72 SHORT LIt'B OP THOMAS DAVIS.

But we toss these aside — such vile, vagabond lumber
Are but just worth a groan from ' The Nation's
FmsT Number.' "

By a curious coincidence the arrangements were
completed on Davis's twenty-eighth birthday, and
next morning the journal was flying through the city.
In his correspondence with Maddyn we have the
story of its success.

" The Nation sold its whole impression of No. 1 be-
fore twelve o'clock this morning, and could have sold
twice as many more if they had been printed, as they
ought to have been ; but the fault is on the right side.
The office window was actually broken by the newsmen
in their impatience to get more. The article called
* The Nation ' is by Duflfy ; ' Aristocratic Institutions/
by Dillon ; ' Our First Number,' by Mangan ; * Ancient
Irish Literature,' 'The Epigram on Stanley,' and the
capital ' Exterminators' Song,' are by O'Callaghan. The
article on 'The English Army in Afghanistan, etc.,' the
mock proclamation to the Irish soldiers, and the reviews
of the two Dublin magazines, are by myself. . . . The
articles you propose would do admirably in your hands.
Duflfy is the very greatest admirer of the sketches of
Brougham and Peel that I ever met. [Sketches by
Maddyn in the Dublin Monthly Magazine.] Perhaps
in a newspaper the points should be more salient and
the writing more rough and uncompromising than in
a magazine. Duflfy seems to think that if number three,
your lightest, dare-devilish potepn article, were to come
first, it would most readily fall in with the rest of the
arrangements.'*

THE JOURNALIST. 73

Wallis, who was nothing if not critical, administered

a bitter to correct any excess of sweets. He wrote to

Davis :

"I have not yet seen the new birth to unrighteous-
ness, the unclean thing, with the holy name embroidered
on its frontlets and phylacteries. [He objected vehem-
ently to the title of the journal.] Not a copy procurable
by me, and sundry other speculative individuals, even
at a premium. One thing you may be sure of: the
newsmen are open-mouthed against you. I have listened
with pastoral patience to several of their diatribes.
They say you might have sold in Dublin ten times
what you printed for the city circulation; and that
they warned you early in the week, and offered to
lift you and your compeers to the Seventh Heaven on
a pyramid of two hundred quires, and you had not the
spunk to venture."*

Maddyn, who had made difficulties at the outset in
helping a journal with whose main aim he was not
in sympathy, soon became a regular contributor of
critical and biographical papers ; and Davis treated
him with a frank confidence and affectionate deference
which soothed the sensitive literary spirit. He sent
him suggestions for articles from time to time, and
kept him acquainted with the secret history of the
enterprise.

" The paper is selling finely. The authorships this

* October 17th.

74 SHORT LIFE OF THOMAS DAVIS-

week run thus — *War with Everybody/ by J. F.
Murray ; ' Reduction of Rents,' and the ' Faugh a
BaUagh,' by Duffy ; ' Time no Title,' ' The Sketch of
Moore,* and 'The Grave,' by myself. . . . The Mail
says we are at work to establish a French party !
They'll say by-and-by we have Hoche's ghost or the
National Guard in the back office ; but devil may care,
'Foes of Freedom Fatjgh a Ballagh."

And again : —

*' Duffy and I are delighted at your undertaking the
notice of Father Mathew. In your hands, and with
your feeling, the article will be worthy of the man.
The portrait of him will not be out of Landell's hands
for a little time. The Sliiel or the Avonmore and
O'Loghlen would probably oome best next. The country
people are delighted with us if their letters speak true.
We have severaJ ballads, ay, and not bad ones, ready ;
'Noctes,' 'squibs/ etc., in preparation. In the present
number, * The Reduction of Rents,* and the ' Conti-
nental Literature,' with the translation from La Men-
nais (who has, I see, turned missionary), are by Dillon.
' The O'Connell Tribute * is by Daunt (aided by Duffy's
revision and my quotation from Burke). ' The Revolu-
tion in Canada,' and * An Irish Yampire/ are mine.

Ballads and songs, founded on incidents of Irish
history, had been a speciality in the Belfast journal
which I edited — Clarence Mangan, Dr. Murray, a pro-
fessor in Maynooth College, and T. M. Hughes, as
well as the editor, had joined in this experiment — and
I consulted Davis and Dillon on the policy of con-
tinuing them in the Nation. Neither of them had

THH JOURNALIST. 75

ever published a line of verse, but they were willing
to make the experiment. In the third number some
verses of Davis's were published, but Dillon was dis-
contented with his own production, and never could
be got to renew the attempt. It was in the sixth
number that Davis suddenly put forth his strength.
The night before publication he brought me the
'* Lament of Owen Roe O'Neill," a ballad of singu-
lar originality and power. The dramatic opening
arrested attention like a sudden strain of martial
music : —

" * Did they dare, did they dare, to day Owen Roe

O'Neill?'
*Ye8, they slew with poison him they feared to meet

with steel.*
' May God wither up their hearts ! may their blood cease

to flow!
May they walk in living death who poisoned Owen

Roe.'"

The enthusiastic reception of this ballad by friends
whose judgment he trusted was like a revelation to
him. He came to understand that he possessed a
faculty till then unsuspected. He could express his
passionate convictions on the past, and his rapturous
reveries on the future, in the only shape in which they
would not appear extravagant or fantastic. He as-
sumed the signature of " the Celt *' to signify his
descent from the Welsh and Irish Gael, and it was

76 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS.

soon widely recognized that the soul of an old bardic
race throbbed again in his song. He recalled with
pride that the greatest modern lyrists — B^ranger,
Moore, and perhaps Burns — were Celts, and, as he
insisted, brethren of the same family :

" One in name and in fame
Are the world-divided Gaels."*

But Burns was an utter Lowlander.

Strength comes to the strong and wealth to the
rich. After a little time, verses often as good as
Davis's or Mangan's flowed in from new contributors.
It was suggested in a provincial paper in the north
that the poetry of the Nation must be written by
Moore and the prose by Sheil and Carleton. And
the fourth number contained a paper which, when its
author made himself known (as he did in a little time),
rendered these wild stories probable. O'Connell,
who had not written anonymously in a newspaper for
nearly a generation, was so impressed by the astonish-
ing success of the Nation, that he sent me a long and
vigorous paper entitled " A Repeal Catechism ; " and
John O'Connell returned to the fold, with a leading
article and a number of verses.f

* T. D. McGee.

t " Mr. Daunt brought in John O'Connell, who, as the
favourite son of the national leader, was counted an important
accession — for the prospectus at any rate ; but on the remon-

THE JOURNALIST. 77

The success was vigorously pushed. The principal
contributors met once a week at a frugal supper to
exchange opinions and project the work of the coming
week. These informal conferences proved a valuable
training-school, less, perhaps, for what the young men
taught each other than for what each taught himself.
It is the silent process of rumination, doubtless, which
determines the main lines of thought, but some men
never know 'thoroughly their own opinions on a sub-
ject till the train of slumbering reflection has been
awakened by controversy, and the obscure points
lighted by the sparks struck out in conflict. An
illustrated gallery of distinguished Irishmen was com-
menced, to set up anew on their pedestals our forgotten
or neglected patriots ; feuilletons, original and trans-
lated from the French, appeared in every number for
a time ; and a system of " Answers to Correspondents,"
real and imaginary, was opened, in which new projects
were broached, books and men briefly criticized, and
seeds of fresh thought sown widely in the popular mind.
The ballads and songs were our most unequivocal suc-
cess, and Davis, who doubted at the outset the feasi-
bility of the experiment, not only made the most

strance of some of the existing journalists, who considered them-
selves injured by the publication of his name in that character,
he separated from us before the issue of the first number, and
only returned when to be a writer in the Nation had become a
distinction worth coveting " ( Young Ireland^ chap. iii).

78 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS-

brilliant contributions to it, but interpreted its purpose
most sympathetically.

"National poetry," he afterwards wrote, "presents
the most dramatic events, the largest characters, the
most impresive scenes, and the deepest passions in the
language most familiar to us. It magnifies and ennobles
our hearts, our intellects, our country, and our country-
men ; binds us to the land by its condensed and gem-
like history — to the future by example and by aspiration.
It solaces us in travel, fires us in action, prompts our
invention, sheds a grace beyond the power of luxury
round our homes, is the recognized envoy of our minds
among all mankind and to all time."

We had soon to repress a rage for versifying, often
merely mimetic, sometimes as mechanical as the music
of a barrel organ, which the success of the NatiorCs
poets begot. Correspondents were told that the student
who could rescue an Irish air or an Irish manuscript,
or preserve an Irish ruin from destruction ; who could
make a practical suggestion for bettering the social
condition of the people, gather a fading tradition,
throw light on an obscure era of our history, or help
to instruct the people among whom he lived, would do
a substantial and honourable service to his country,
which need leave him no regret for wanting the gift of
song. There was no mercy for nonsense, and the
judgment on new verses or projects which the people
applauded was often considered harsh and peremptory.

THE JOURNALIST. 79

the reader little suspecting that the merciless critic
was often the author himself in masquerade.

The reception of the paper in the provinces was a
perplexity to veteran journalists. From the first num-
ber it was received with an enthusiasm compounded
of passionate sympathy and personal affection. It
went on increasing in circulation till its purchasers in
every provincial town exceeded those of the local
paper, and its readers were multiplied indefinitely by
the practice of regarding it not as a vehicle of news
but of opinion. It never grew obsolete, but passed
from hand to hand till it was worn to fragments. The
delight which young souls thirsting for nutriment found
in it has been compared to the refreshment afforded
by the sudden sight of a Munster valley in May after
a long winter ; but the unexpected is a large source of
enjoyment, and it resembled rather the sight of a
garden cooled by breezes and rivulets from the
Nile, in the midst of a long stretch of sandbanks
without a shrub or a blade of grass.

The doctrines which the new writers taught have a
permanent interest, for they were the seed of many
harvests to come. Though they were daring to rash-
ness, and to timorous ears sounded like the tocsin of
revolution, they were restrained by habitual submis-
sion to the eternal laws of morality and justice.
Nothing was taught which was not, in their belief.

8o SHORT LIFE OF THOMAS DAVIS-

intrinsically just and right, or which did not appeal to
the noblest motives a generous but untaught people
could be made to comprehend. Much of this teach-
ing was the direct work of Davis ; but all his colleagues
were busy completing the cosmos of Irish nationality,
and a skilful critic will discern a variance of style,
corresponding with variations of character of which
natural style is a sure reflex.

The teaching might well constitute a primer of
generous nationality.

" The restoration of Irish Independence," it was said,
" has been advocated too exclusively by narrow appeals
to economy, and sought by means which neither con-
ciliated nor frightened its opponents. "We shall try, and
God willing we shall succeed in arraying the memories
of our land, the deep, strong, passions of men's hearts,
in favour of our cause. And while we shall shrink from
repeating any factious or offensive cry, we shall counsel
and explain those means of liberation which heroic free-
men from Pelopidas to Washington have sanctioned.

" The restoration of land to the people had for a
century no reason to support it save the musket of the
ejected heir, desperate from suffering, and no witness
save the peasant when the scaffold saw him martyred.
We shaU strive not merely to explain the workings of
landlord misrule in Ireland, but to show how similar
wrongs have been remedied in other countries ; seek to
satisfy quiet intelligent men that the people cannot and
""^ught not to be patient under the lash, and to urge such
men to prevent the unguided vengeance of that people
by leading them to redress.

THE JOURNALIST. 8 1

" The people of Ireland are few enough for the size
and capabilities of their country, but they are too many
for its present state. They have no manufactures, there
are no home-spent rents to give agricultural wages, there
remains only the land; from that they are being
ejected by the wicked and stupid scheme of consolida-
tion, or, if left, it is under rack-rents, in wet wig-
wams, with rags not enough on their backs, and
potatoes not enough for their food. If the Irish aris-
tocracy persevere in exacting rack-rents, in clearing and
consolidating ; if absenteeism, want of employment and
want of manufactures leave the people nothing between
starvation in freedom or half-starvation in bondage in a
workhouse, — if this come to pass, other things, not
dreamed of just now, will foUow.

" The popular organization is too exclusively political
It ought to be used for the creation and diflfusion of
national literature, vivid with the memories and hopes
of a thoughtful and impassioned people. It may guide
and encourage our countrymen, not only in all which
concerns their libraries and lectures, but what is of
greater importance, their music, their paintings, their
public sports, those old schools of faith and valour.

"Men still speak of compromises, and material com-
pensation for our lost nationality. But though English-
men were to give us the best tenures on earth, though
they were to equalize Presbyterian, Catholic, and Epis-
copalian, though they were to give us the completest
representation in their Parliament, restore our absentees,
disencumber us of their debt, and redress every one of
our fiscal wrongs in the names of liberty and ooimtry,
we would still tell them, in the name of enthusiastic
hearts thoughtful souls, and fearless spirits, that we
spumed the gifts if the condition were that Ireland
should remain a province."

G

82 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS.

Let it be remembered that O'Connell's doctrine
was that the Irish race were endowed with all good
gifts, physical and moral without stint, and were poor
and obscure only through the sins of their oppressors.
The Nation taught that to the evils inflicted on them
by raisgovernment were added other evils created or
fostered by faults of their own. They wanted, not
only education and discipline, but the priceless habit
of perseverance. They had committed painful follies
and crimes, but they still possessed native virtue
which would infallibly redeem them at the cost of the
necessary labour and sacrifice.

" To make our liberty an inheritance for our children
and a charter of prosperity, the people must study as
well as strive, and learn as well as feel. Of all the
agencies of freedom, education was the most important.
It was in the mind of a people the seeds of future
greatness and prosperity were stored. The destruction
of her industry only made Ireland poor — the waste of
her mind left her a slave. Education, from being a
crime punishable with heavy penalties, became, under
the gradual change of weapons which tyranny was com-
pelled to adopt, a wicked and deliberate scheme of
proselytism. There was still no system of national educa-
tion adequate to the wants, and adapted to the genius
of our people. A little while ago there was none that
was not an insult and a curse.

"A people not familiar with the past would never
understand the present or realize the future. One of
the tasks the Nation humbly desired to perform was to

THB JOURNALiaT. 83

make the dead past familiar to the memory and imagi-
nation of the Irish people as the greatest and surest
incentive to reclaim the control of their country; and
not merely the past of their own country, but of the
old and new worlds. The people did not recognize this
imperative want. They were accustomed to consider
themselves abreast or ahead of the rest of the world.
The melancholy fact was that in all education —
scholastic, social, and professional — ^they are behind
most civilized nations. Energy, endurance, tenderness,
piety, and faith — ^the natural elements of the highest
moral and intellectual character — they still possessed as
fresh as they existed in France or England centuries
ago, in the ages of Faith and Action. But their best
powers were unorganized and undeveloped, from want
of that severe discipline so essential to bind in its
harness the impetuous irregular vigour of our Celtic
nature. A people with natural gifts which, under
favourable circumstances, would produce not only
artisans of the finest touch, but painters, musicians, and
inventors, sweated under the heaviest toil in the world
— felled the forests of Australia and drained the swamps
of Canada.

"We Irish were inctdbioso stroRUM. For ten who
read MacGeoghegan a himdred read Leland, and for
one who looked into the Rebum Hibebnicabttm Sceep-
TORES a thousand studied Hume. Thus we judge our
fathers by the calumnies of their foes. If Ireland were
in national health, her history would be familiar by
books, pictures, statuary, and music, to every cabin and
workshop in the land ; her resources, as an agricultural
manufacturing, and trading people, would be equally
known ; and every young man would be trained, and
every grown man able to defend her coast, her plains,
her towns, and her hills — not with his right arm merely.

84 SHORT LIFE OF THOMAS DAVIS-

but by his disciplined habits and military accomplish-
ments. These were the pillars of independence.

" Some of us were base enough to do cheerfully the
work of the enemy. It was a mistake to imagine that
the only Irish hodmen in London were those poor fellows
who were always ascending and descending ladders with
bricks and mortar. There were hodmen in Parliament,
who fetched and carried all sorts of rubbish for their
masters — newspaper hodmen, ready to knock their
country down with a brickbat — pamphleteering hodmen,
who get a despicable living by mixing dirty facts and
false figures together, and flinging them at Ireland,
wherever they see a chance of getting their mortar to
stick. Thus we abandoned self-respect, and we were
treated with contempt ; and nothing could be more
natural, nothing more just. It is self-respect which
makes a people respected by others, as order makes them
strong, virtue formidable, patience victorious.

"Let Bepealers, then, lift up their own souls, and
try by teaching and example to lift up the souls of
their family and neighbours to that pitch of industry,
courage, information, and wisdom necessary to enable an
enslaved, darkened, and starving people to become free,
enlightened, and prosperous. And let them never for-
get what gifts and what zeal were needed to perform
that work eflfectually — what mildness to win, what
knowledge to inform, what reasoning to convince, what
vigour to rouse, what skill to combine and wield. They
had been sometimes driven to employ the * coward's
arms, trick, and chicane ; ' but they must renounce these
vices. Extreme course might be necessary in the
struggle on which the country had entered, but dis-
honourable means never."

But the work of the journal was necessarily subor-

THB JOURNALIST. 8$

dinate to that of the national organization, and to this
it is now necessary to turn. O'Connell had rashly
promised that 1843 should be "the Repeal year" —
the year when his great object would be accomplished,
and he brought all the prodigious force of his will and
intellect to redeem this promise. Nature gave him
a physical vigour which labour could scarcely exhaust,
an imperturbable good temper, a courtesy before ad-
versaries, and a diplomacy which was dexterous and
versatile. Under these lay a subterranean rage against
injustice or opposition, which burst out at times like
a volcano. His passionate oratory in the Catholic
struggle raised the heart of the people as miUtary
music refreshes and stimulates the weary soldier, and
this fire was not exhausted. Though he was tor
mented by the public and domestic troubles which a
man so placed rarely escapes — for cares gather round
the high-placed as clouds round the mountain summits
— he worked with unwavering perseverance. In Feb-
ruary he published a little volume in which the wrongs
inflicted on Ireland since the invasion were collected
from annals and records, and presented in one huge
indictment. In March he raised the national ques-
tion by a motion before the Dublin Corporation, in a
speech of remarkable power and provident modera-
tion. He was answered by Isaac Butt on behalf of
the Conservative party 5 and the controversy was con-

86 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS-

ducted with so much capacity and mutual forbearance,
that it kindled desire and hope in many minds which
long were apathetic.

Davis and the principal writers of the Nation were
active members of the general committee of the As-
sociation. The ordinary business of a committee-man
was to second, or, if he could not second, at least to
echo the proposals of O'Connell. But the new men,
as we have seen, had a policy and ideas of their own —
a policy not designed to thwart, but to complete and
consummate the purpose O'Connell aimed to accom-
plish. Davis hoped to enlist the middle class in the
movement, and to inflame young men of both races
with a national spirit. Dillon desired that the con-
dition of the peasantry should receive immediate at-
tention, and the question of land tenure and poor-laws
to be promptly taken into consideration. Others had
plans of systematic popular education and a legion of
projects more or less practical for advancing the cause.
They commenced to develop opinion, and to act on
principles which have since become the common
property of all enlightened Irishmen. There was
naturally surprise and jealousy at the outset, but the
new recruits were not men to whom it was possible to
attribute sinister motives. Dillon was always sweet,
placid, and open \ and the transparent sincerity which
looked out of Davis's large candid eyes, and from his

THE JOURNALIST. 87

open, earnest face, dissipated suspicion; while an
energy that prompted him to engage in all the labour
of the largest designs and all the drudgery of the
minutest details disarmed jealousy. The result was
a transformation scene which only those who have
witnessed it with their eyes will fully understand. In
the midst of the old traditional agitation, grown de-
crepid and somewhat debauched, a new power claimed
recognition. The servile and illiterate agitators who
acknewledged no law but the will of their leader, saw
among them men of original ideas and commanding
intellect, who pressed their opinions on their audience
with becoming modesty indeed, but without the
smallest fear or hesitation.

Davis avoided wounding dangerous susceptibilities
less from policy than from the generosity and modesty
of his nature ; and, at this time, O'Connell certainly
felt that he had got colleagues whose ability and zeal
would do effective service, though they did not always
run in the traditional harness. Looking back through
the rarified atmosphere of experience, I cannot insist
that all our designs were discreet or practical. We
were defeated by a narrow majority on the proposal to
maintain an agent in Paris, as the centre of political
activity in Europe, which, had it been accepted, would
certainly have been savagely misrepresented by the
enemies of the national cause. O'Connell's sons were

SS SttORt LIFE OP THOMAS BAVIS.

at times defeated in the Committee on questions ari-
sing between them and the new men, and once or twice
O'Connell himself had to accept proposals which he
did not entirely relish. The practical man of the
world bore a slight reverse with a good humour which
disarmed opposition ; for he knew the proposals were
always designed to feed the flame of nationality.

Much was done to enlarge and vitalize the old tradi-
tional system. An historical and political library of
reference was collected, peculiarly rich in the rare
Anti-Union and Emancipation pamphlets. The cards
of membership were made an agency for teaching the
people national history and statistics, and familiarizing
them with the effigies of their great men. A band was
trained to play national airs in public for the first
time since the Union. And Repeal wardens were
exhorted to watch over historic ruins in their district,
and to encourage the people to found news-rooms and
local societies.

We are apt to regard as trite and commonplace the
transactions of our own day, but drape these young
men like Rienzi in the forum or like the Swiss foresters
who led the Alpine spears at Morgartan, and they be-
come picturesque and heroic. Rightly understood,
the work they had undertaken was of the same scope
and magnitude, though it was not projected in the
gloom of forests or the shade of august ruins, but under

THE JOURNALIST. 89

the glare of sunshine in committee rooms and news-
paper offices, by men clothed in paletots and chimney-
pot hats.

After the serious business of life began, Davis had
no longer leisure for elaborate correspondence. He
wrote constantly to a chosen few, but only notes as
brief as bulletins. His mind produced abundantly
the fresh fancies, the just reflections, and the graceful
badinage which make the charm of perfect letters, but
all went to swell the stream of public work, on which
his heart was set. His correspondence is valuable
chiefly because it tells us what he was doing, and
thinking of, and makes plain the unbroken purpose of
his life.

To Maddyn he wrote most habitually. He desired
to engage him in a project for a high-class periodical
on Federalistic principles — Federalism being then
much spoken of among National Whigs as a possible
compromise.

"Enclosed are some suggestions for Nation papers,
by Duffy, which of course you'll accept, change, or
rejectj as you like. Munster Society would give you
fine subjects — sketches of classes of characters. Kow to
your letter.

"The party who would sustain the Review are
Federalists — men thoroughly national in feeling, catholic
in taste, and moderate in politics. Things have come
to that pass that we must be disgraced and defeated,
or we must separate by force, or we must have a

90 SHORT LIFE OF THOMAS DAVIS.

Federal Government. Mere repeal is raw and popular.
The Federalists include all who were Whigs in Belfast,
the best of your Cork men, Wyse, Caulfield, and
several excellent men through the country. Hudson
and Torrens McCullagh, Deasy, Wallis, and all that
set are Federalists. I will not ask you to come until
matters are fixed and safe and clear ; all I wished now
was to know might you come ? Tou would make a great,
a perfect editor. We must parochialize the people by
property and institutions, and idealize and soften them
by music, history, ballad, art, and games. That is, if
we succeed, and are not hanged instead ; but I know
my principles will succeed."

After the Corporation debate the Repeal Association
received important recruits and a great accession of
friends, and it was determined to summon a muster
of the whole population in each of the counties in suc-
cession. These assemblies were so gigantic that the
Times described them as ** monster meetings" — a
title which they retained. During the summer the
monster meetings increased in number and enthusiasm,
and the Irish Tories called upon the Government to
check them by some sharp stroke of authority. Sir
Edward Sugden, an English lawyer, at that time Lord
Chancellor of Ireland, answered their appeal by re-
moving Lord Ffrench and four and twenty other
magistrates from the Commission of the Peace, for the
new offence of attending public meetings in favour of
the Repeal of the Union. Mr. Smith O'Brien, till
then known as an Irish Whig of popular sympathies,

THE JOURNALIST. 9 1

inquired in Parliament if the same discipline was to
be extended to English magistrates ; and not getting
a satisfactory reply, he resigned his commission, which
could no longer, he conceived, be held by an Irish
gentleman without humiliation. Lord Cloncurry,
Henry Grattan, and a number of other country gentle-
men followed his example. The Bar struck a more
effectual stroke. Twenty barristers joined the Associa-
tion in one day as a protest against the unconsti-
tutional character of an executive who degraded
magistrates for taking one side of a debatable public
question, while they applauded other magistrates
for taking the opposite side. Among these recruits
were Thomas O'Hagan, afterwards Lord Chancellor ;
Sir Colman O'Loghlen, afterwards Judge Advocate-
General ; and Thomas MacNevin, and M. J. Barry —
the two latter of whom from that time became constant
associates of the young men of the Nation.

In answer to some remonstrance on the rashness of
his policy, Davis wrote to Maddyn : —

"You seem to me to underrate our resources. The
Catholic population are more miited^ bold, and orderly
than ever they were. Here are materials for defence
or attack, civil or military. The hearty junction of the
CathoUc bishops is of the greatest value. The Protes-
tants of the loTver order are neutral ; the land question
and repeated disappointments from England have
alienated them from their old views. Most of the edu-

92 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS-

cated Protestants now profess an ardent nationaKty,
and say that, if some pledge against a Catholic ascen-
dancy could be given them, they too would be Re-
pealers. You will see by the accompanying paper that
fourteen barristers, most of them men of good business,
joined yesterday. The Americans are constantly offer-
ing us men, money^ and arms. . . . Crowds of soldiers
and police are enrolled Repealers. These are some of
our resources. The present agitation will not fail for
want of statesmanship, though it may for want of
energy. Even O'Connell has looked very far ahead this
time, and he knows he cannot retreat. I think we can
beat Peal. If we can quietly get a Federal Govern-
ment I shall for one agree to it and support it. K not,
then anything but what we are."

Davis's character is exhibited, not only in what he

did and wrote, but in the echoes of it which came

back to him from friends, even when they took the

character of objections or remonstrances. Denny

Lane wrote at this time : —

"Short, narrative, and not descriptive, ballads are
greatly wanted in Irish literature. By all means stick
to poetry, but pray do not abandon professional success
— you are fully equal to two strong pursuits. If you
should meet political disappointment, your literary
talents and poetical longings will always keep existence
fresh."

Maddyn applauded an attempt which I had recently
made to expose the ignorance and dishonesty of the
school of pseudo-Irish romances then becoming
popular in England.

THE JOURNALIST. 93

"I have read with delight an article in the Nation
on Lever's works. It is most admirably done ; whoever
the writer is, he has certainly displayed no ordinary
literary abilities ; and never did any Irish writer deserve
more richly the treatment he has met with at the hands
of honest Irish criticism. I cannot conceive the spurious
liberality which affects to patronize the anti-national
tendencies of all this man's writings^ on account of the
rollicking devil-may-care sort of factious fun and fero-
cious drollery of his slipshod, flimsy, fashionable,
novelish style of writing."*

The Nation^ while it urged on the monster meetings
and the entire O'Connell programme, never neglected
its individual policy. It was a puzzle to the people
to find Irishmen of genius honoured and applauded
without any regard to their political opinions. Up to
that time the popular test was simply the relation
of a man to the great tribune. If he hurrahed for
O'Connell with sufficient vehemence, much was
forgiven him in conduct and opinion ; if he criticized
the darling of the nation, scarcely any service was an
adequate set off. Even Moore fell into disfavour for
singing, in one of his later melodies, the decay of
public spirit in Ireland.

This uniform courtesy and firmness towards
opponents, though it was new in Irish controversy,
did not offend popular feeling, because it was accom-

• June lo, 1843. The article was entitled " Plunderings and
Blunderings of Harry Lorrequer."

Q4 SHORT LIFE OF THOMAS DAVIS.

panied by an unsparing exposure of the system they
maintained. Though it was a main aim of the young
men to reconcile the gentry and the Protestant
minority with the whole nation, it was an aim never
pursued by ignoring the intolerable injustice of the
Established Church and the existing land system.
" Be just, and you shall be the acknowledged leaders of
a devoted people ; but justice must be done, for they
are withering under your exactions." This was the
language held. The gentry were told that they had
never done their duly, and that their neglect of it
lay at the root of Irish misery. The land system
which they had framed in the Irish Parliament
seemed an instrument of torture needlessly stringent
for a people so broken and dependent, but, like a great
bridge over a small stream, it gave the measure of the
slumbering force which it was intended to restrain.
The awakening of this force was the object of their
constant apprehension, and it was now appealed to
weekly with ideas that struck it like electric shocks.
The Nation taught as axioms that the land was not the
landlord's own to do as he would with, but could only
be held in proprietorship subject to the prior claim of
the inhabitants to get food and clothing out of it. No
length of time and no solemnity of sanction could
annul the claim of the husbandman to eat the fruit of
his toil, or transfer the claim to a select circle of landed

THE JOURNALIST. QS

proprietors. Why should landlords be the only class of
traders above the law ? There was no more inherent
sanctity in selling land, or hiring it out, than in selling
shoes j and the trader in acres ought to be as amen-
able to the law, and as easily punished for extortion as
his humbler brother. The existing system had lasted
long indeed, but fraud and folly were not consecrated
by time, they only grew grosser fraud and more in-
tolerable folly. The landlord was entitled to a fair
rent for the usufruct of his land ; all claims beyond
this, over the tenant's time, conscience, or opinions,
were extortion or usurpation.

It would be unskilful criticism to judge the verses
Davis wrote in intervals of this busy and stormy life by
the canons we apply to a poet in his solitude. His
aims were far away from literary success All his
labours tended only to stimulate and discipline the
people, and his dearest hope was to take part in guid-
ing the counsels of a nation which he had prompted
into action and marshalled to victory. The place he
would have loved to fill was not beside Moore and
Goldsmith, but beside O'Neill and Grattan.

A song or ballad was struck off at a heat, when a
flash of inspiration came, — scrawled with a pencil, in a
large hand, on a sheet of post-paper, with unfinished
lines, perhaps, and blanks for epithets which did not
come at once of the right measure or colour ^ but the

96 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS.

chain of sentiment or incident was generally complete.
If there was time it was revised later and copied once
more with pen and ink, and last touches added before
it was despatched to the printer ; but if occasion de-
manded, it went at once. For his verses were written
to make Irishmen understand and love Ireland, as the
poet understood and loved her. What Robert Bums
wrote of his own purpose and inspiration as a poet,
Davis might have written of himself, changing only the
nationality.

"Scottish scenes and Scottish 8ix)ry are the themes
I wish to sing. I have no dearer aim than to make
leisurely pilgrimages through Caledonia, to sit on the
fields of her battles, to wander on the romantic banks
of her rivers, and to muse by the stately towers or
venerable ruins once the honoured abodes of her
heroes."*

And in one sense he was more of a national poet
than any of the illustrious writers whom I have named :
he embraced the whole nation in his sympathy.
Bdranger scorned and detested a party which formed a
substantial minority of his countrymen ; Moore scar-
cely recognised the existence of a peasantry in his
national melodies ; even Burns, a Lowland poet, had
imperfect sympathy with the natives of the mountains
among whom Walter Scott was to find his heroes. But
Davis loved and sang the whole Irish people.
♦ Robert Bums's letter to Mrs, Dunlop.

THE JOURNALIST. 97

"Here came the proud Phoenician, the man of trade
and toil —

Here came the proud Milesian, a-hungering for spoil ;

And the Firbolg and the Cymry, and the hard, endur-
ing Dane,

And the iron Lords of Normandy, with the Saxons in
their train.

" And oh ! it were a gallant deed to show before man-
kind,

How every race and every creed might be by love
combined —

Might be combined yet not forget the fountains whence
they rose,

As, filled by many a rivulet^ the stately Shannon flows."

But the native rulers who held their own for cen-
turies against the invader touched him closest. Here
are a few verses from a vigorous and picturesque
ballad entitled, "A True Irish King"—

"The Caesar of Borne has a wider domain,

And the Ard Righ of France has more clans in his

train.
The sceptre of Spain is more heavy with gems,
And our crowns cannot vie with the Greek diadems ;
But kingHer far, before heaven and man.
Are the Emerald fields, and the fiery-eyed clan,
The sceptre, and state, and the poets who sing,
And the swords that encircle A True Irish King."

"For he must have come from a conquering race —
The heir of their valour, their glory, their grace :
His frame must be stately, his step must be fleet.
His hand must be trained to each warrior ieat,

H

98 SHORT LIFE OF THOMAS DAVIS-

His face, as the harvest moon, steadfast and clear,

A head to enlighten, a spirit to cheer;

While the foremost to rush where the battle-brands

ring,
And the last to retreat is A True Ieish King l"

It is curious how soon and how thoroughly this town-
bred bookish man caught the characteristics of social
life in an Irish village. Griffin or Carleton could
scarcely surround a modest Irish girl about to become
a bride with more characteristic incidents than these:—

"We meet in the market and fair —

We meet in the morning and night —
He sits on the half of my chair,

And my people are wild with delight.
Yet I long through the winter to skim,

Though Eoghan longs more, I can see,
When I will be married to him.
And he will be married to me.

Then, oh ! the marriage, the marriage,

With love and mo buachaill for me !
The ladies that ride in a carriage,
Might envy the marriage of me."

There is not, I think, in the lyrics of Burns a more
spontaneous gush of natural feeling in unstudied words
than this song of a peasant girl :.—

"His kiss is sweet, his word is kind.
His love is rich to me ;
I could not in a palace find
A truer heart than he.

THE JOURNALIST. 99

The eagle shelters not his nest

From hurricane and hail
More bravely than he guards my breast —

This Boatman of Kinsale.

" The brawling squires may heed him not,

The dainty stranger sneer —
But who will dare to hurt our cot,

When Myles O'Hea is here?
The scarlet soldiers pass along ;

They'd like, but fear to rail ;
His blood is hot, his blow is strong —

The Boatman of Kinsale."

In these ballads he is never guilty of the bad taste of
undervaluing the enemy with whom his people struggle.
How fine is this picture of the English column at
Fontenoy ! —

" Six thousand English veterans in stately column tread,
Their cannon blaze in front and flank, Lord Hay is at

their head
Steady they step a-down the slope — steady they climb

the hill ;
Steady they load— steady they fire, moving right onward

still,
Betwixt the wood and Fontenoy, as through a furnace

blast,
Through rampart, trench, and palisade, and bullet-s

showering fast;
And on the open plain above they rose, and kept their

course,
With ready fire and grim resolve, that mocked at

hostile force :

100 SHORT LIFE OF THOMAS DAVIS.

Past Fontenoy, past Fontenoy, while thinner grow their

ranks —
They break, as broke the Zuyder Zee through Holland's

ocean banks.

"More idly than the summer flies, French tirailleurs

rush round;
As stuble to the lava tide, French squadrons strew the

ground ;
Bomb-shell, and grape, and round-shot tore, still on they

marched and fired —
Fast, from each volley, grenadier and voltigeur retired.
' Push on, my household cavalry 1' King Louis madly

cried :
To death they rush, but rude their shock — not un-
avenged they died.
On through the camp the column trod — King Louis

turns his rein :
'Not yet, my liege,' Saxe interposed, 'the Irish troops

remain ; '
And Fontenoy, famed Fontenoy, had been a Waterloo,
Were not these exiles ready then, fresh, vehement, and

true."'

The number of poems produced in three years
supply evidence of his singular fertility. Moore, we
know from his diary, spent day after day over one of his
" Irish Melodies." Beranger with the same frankness
describes the prolonged labour a song cost him ; half
a dozen a year were as many as he could finish to his
satisfaction. Davis in the midst of engrossing political
labours, produced three times as many — nearly fifty in
three years ; and his friends might place the ** Battle

THE JOUBNALIST. lOI

of Fontenoy," or the "Sack of Baltimore," beside
*' Remember the glories of Brian the Brave," or " Le
Chant du Cosaque," as confidently as Turner hung
one of his landscapes side by side with a Claude.

The young men who had yet no political designation
or nickname to distinguish them were drawn more and
more together by personal sympathy. The connection
grew as political connections are apt to grow ', they
had a common stock of opinions, a journal to express
them, much social intercourse, leaders whom they
trusted, and opposition enough to discipline and con-
solidate their union.

A weekly supper was held at each other's houses in
succession, to preserve the sentiment of equality and
fraternity. It was a council table in effect, where every
one brought his intellectual offering of frank criticism,
practical suggestion, story or song, and might be sure
of unstinted recognition ; for this friendly gathering of
men running the same race was as free from envy or
rivalry as any assembly of men ever was on the earth.
Every one was busy in a common cause, and a brother-
hood of design is the poetry of what in ordinary cir-
cumstances is mere esprz'f de corps. Davis was a peer
among his peers, never aiming at any lead that was not
spontaneously accorded him, and scarcely accepting
that much without demur. He loved to be loved,
but he was totally indifferent to popularity, and is dis-

102 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS.

tinguished from all Irish tribunes who preceded him
or have followed him by a perfectly genuine desire to
remain unknown, and reap neither recognition nor re-
ward from his work. Thinkers who habitually debate
the serious interests of life are apt to oppress their
audience by the gravity of their speech. But Davis's
conversation was cheerful and natural, and his demean-
our familiar and winning.

At this time he was under thirty years of age, a
strongly built, middle-sized man, with beaming face, a
healthy glow, and deep blue eyes, set in a brow of solid
strength. His countenance was agreeable from ex-
pression rather than from contour, and was habitually
lighted up with sincerity and cordiality. There was a
manly carelessness in his bearing, as of one who, though
well-dressed, never thought of dress or appearance.
When he accidentally met a friend, he had the habit of
throwing back his head to express a pleased surprise,*
which was very winning ; a voice not so much sonorous
as sympathetic, a cordial laugh and cheerful eyes com-
pleted the charm.

The most surprising characteristic of his talk was its
simpHcity. He was never a colloquial athlete, making

" I see that start of glad surprise,
The lip comprest, the moistened eyes ;
I hear his deep impressive tone,
And feel his clasp, a brother's own " (O'llagan).

THE JOURNALIST. I03

happy hits and adroit fences ; he spoke chiefly of the
interests of the hour with plainness and sincerity, but
his opinions were apt to come out in sentences which
would be remembered for their significance or solidity.
When moved, which was rarely, he spoke with a proud,
earnest sententiousness, which was very impressive.
There were men among his associates, and men of
notable ability, who announced a new opinion like a
challenge to controversy, but Davis ordinarily dropped
it out like a platitude, on which it was needless to
pause. He loved to condense a cardinal truth into a
familiar winning phrase, as much as some men love to
fabricate a novelty out of a maxim of Epictetus, or an
epigram of Rochefoucauld. To circulate truth was
his object, never to appropriate it and stamp his
own name on it He naturally spoke much, as
he wrote much, for he had a fulness of life which
broke out at all the intellectual pores ; and his
talk had a flavour of wide reading and careful
thought, like the olives and subtle salt which give
its piquancy to a French plat. He never spoke as
a leader or pedagogue, but always as a comrade, and
as a natural result he was loved as much as he was
trusted. To be original, to be deeply in earnest, and
at the same time to be loved, supposes rare qualities,
not only in the man but in his consociates, for few
men can endure to be taught. They sought his

T04 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS.

counsel in difficulties, and always found more than they
sought. In political conferences it was impossible not
to remark a certain abrupt, but not discourteous
dogmatism, but in a tefe-d-tefe not a trace of it
remained : —

"He spoke and words more soft than rain,
Brought back the age of gold again."*

If ever there was a gleam of anger in his eyes you
might be sure it was wrath against some intolerable
wrong, like the pious rage of Dante. It was never pas-
sionate ; his temper was perfect. I have seen him tried
by unreasonable pretensions, by petulant complaints,
by contemptuous dissent from what he held most certain
and sacred, but he maintained a sweet composure and
was master of himself. In these trials nature had need
to be repressed by a disciplined will, for beads of per-
spiration on his broad brow often disclosed the con-
test within ; but angry word or gesture none of his
comrades ever saw. Starting from the perfectly just
assumption that they loved and trusted him, he made
light of dissent. Controversy he knew was one of the
processes by which opinion is created or regulated, and
a man often modifies his opinions in the very act of
defending them. Even his enthusiasm, which was
singularly contagious, was regulated and restrained*

♦ Emerson.

THE JOURNALIST. I05

never clamorous or aggressive. Celtic Irishmen have
a tendency to take offence easily and to stand upon
their dignity quite gratuitously ; his example tended to
correct this weakness, and if it exhibited itself he en-
countered it with a grave sweet courtesy which made
the offender ashamed of himself.

Like Fox he was a " very painstaking man," and
this quality never exhibited itself so assiduously as in
the service of his companions. When he promised
anything, however trivial, or made a casual rendezvous,
one could count on a definite fulfilment — not a common
characteristic of gifted young Celts. He loved to make
his knowledge their common property. When he met
in his readings a new book which enlarged his horizon
of political knowledge, or suggested some new device
for serving the cause, he exhibited such generous
rapture that he roused congenial feelings among his
associates, and inspired even the sceptical with some
of his ardour of study and hopeful views of life.

I must speak of our weekly supper. MacCarthy
was our Sydney Smith. His humour was as sponta-
neous as sunshine, and often flashed out as unex-
pectedly in grave debate as a sunbeam from behind a
mask of clouds. Some practical man proposed that
there should be a close season for jokes, but they did
not impede business, but rather seasoned it and made
it palatable. MacNevin and Barry were wits, and

I06 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS-

sayers of good things ; MacCarthy was a genuine
humourist. MacNevin's mirth was explosive, and
sometimes went off without notice, like steam from a
safety-valve. Barry uttered his good things with a
gravity which set off their dry humour, and was
accused of preparing the tnise en seine, Denny Lane,
on some such occasion, told a story of one of his
fellow-citizens who used to produce a pun once a
year, and gave a dinner party to let it off, sometimes
getting up appropriate scenery, machinery, and deco-
rations for the new birth, which turned his annual
into a little melodrama.

Davis was never a faiseur de phrases, but sayings
of force or significance sometimes fell from him
spontaneously. Some one quoted Plunket's saying
that to certain men history was no better than an old
almanac. **Yes," he replied, "and under certain
other conditions an old almanac becomes an his-
torical romance." I brought to breakfast with him
one morning a young Irish-American recruit, burning
to know personally the men who had drawn him
across the Atlantic, and possessing himself many of
the gifts he loved in them. I asked Davis next day
how he liked Darcy McGee. " With time I might
like him," he said, ** but he seemed too much bent
on transacting an acquaintance with me." A certain
new recruit brought a pocketful of projects, good, bad,

THE JOURNALIST. 107

and indifferent, some of them indeed excellent, but he
exhibited them as if they were the Sibyl's books.
Speaking of him next day, some one said that his
talk was like champagne. "No," said Davis, *'not
like champagne, like seidlitz-powder ; it is efferves-
cent and wholesome, but one never gets rid of the
idea that it is physic." But though he had a keen
enjoyment of pleasantry, and loved banter and badi-
nage, he did not possess the faculty of humour.
When he occasionally made experiments in this
region he became satirical or savage. Like Schiller,
he looked habitually at the graver aspect of human
affairs, and was too much in earnest for the disen-
gaged mind and easy play of faculties necessary to
be sportive. But if we judged Burns by his epigrams,
how low he would be rated.

The youngest of the associates were John O'Hagan*
and John Pigot. O'Hagan was a law student,
labouring to acquire the mastery of principles which
alone makes the law a liberal and philosophical pro-
fession. He was modest and reticent, speaking
rarely, and never of himself or his works. MacCarthy,
in his poem of the " Lay Missionary," has painted
his social life. In literature he made himself

* The late Mr. Justice O'Hagan, head of the Land Commission
in Ireland.

Io8 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS-

gradually known to his colleagues by sound criticism
in the sweetest of wholesome English, and by poems
which constantly extended the range of his powers
into new regions. John Pigot was a bright handsome
boy, son of an eminent Whig lawyer afterwards Chief
Baron of the Exchequer, and Davis held him in
great affection. He was a diligent and zealous
student, and a perpetual missionary of national
opinions in good society. He contributed some-
times, but very rarely, to the Nation^ for he was not
as yet a writer of the requisite vigour or skill for
that office.

O'Callaghan was older than his colleagues, and of
another school. He had gone through the first
Repeal agitation, and had never quite recovered from
its disillusions. He was a tall, dark, strong man, who
spoke a dialect compounded apparently in equal
parts from Johnson and Cobbett, in a voice too loud
for social intercourse. " I love," he would cry, " not
the entremets of literature, but the strong meat and
drink of sedition," or, ** I make a daily meal on the
smoked carcase of Irish history." Some one affirmed
that he heard him instructing his partner in a dance
on the exact limits of the Irish pentarchy and the
malign slander of Giraldus Cambrensis. O'Callaghan
was a thoroughly honest man, but he brought into
Irish politics in his train a younger brother, whose

THE JOURNALIST. I09

sly furtive character none of the young men could
tolerate. He was never admitted to the weekly
suppers, never permitted to write a line in the Nation,
He betook himself to other associates and other
journals, and, in the end, ripened into a Government
spy.

Mangan never came to the weekly suppers, and I
had to invent opportunities of making him known to
a few of our colleagues one by one. He had the
shyness of a man who lives habitually apart, and the
soreness of one whose sensitive nerves have suffered
in contact with the rude world. Like Balzac, Scribe,
and Disraeli, he commenced life in an attorney's
office, and was tortured by the practical jokes and
exuberant spirits of his companions.

William Carleton,* whom I had known for many
years, called at the Nation office from time to time
to criticize or applaud what we were doing, and in
the end to help us. He was cordially received by
the young men, invited to excursions which we made
to historical places, feted and encouraged to become
frankly a Nationalist ; but it is a significant fact that
to the weekly suppers, which were our cabinet
council, he never found his way. He liked the men
cordially, found their talk agreeable and their histori-

♦ Author of Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasants^ etc.

no SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS-

cal excursions, pleasant picnics, at any rate, but their
purpose was something which, with all his splendid
equipment of brains, he was incapable of compre-
hending.

Davis was my senior in age, and greatly more my
senior in knowledge and experience. Educated in a
city, disciplined in a university, living habitually in
society where he had friends and competitors of his
own age and condition, he got the training which
develops the natural forces in the healthiest manner.
I had lived in a small country town, where I had not
the good fortune to encounter one associate of
similar tastes and studies, except Henry MacManus,
the artist, and T. B. MacManus, who has left an
honourable name in Irish annals ; and I had paid the
penalty of being a Catholic in Ireland by being with-
held from a university which still maintains the
agencies of proselytism and the insolence of ascen-
dancy. I took my new friend into my heart of
hearts, where he maintained the first place from that
day forth.

The young men had as yet no visible following, and
might be described in the contemptuous language
which Jefferson flung at the friends of Alexander
Hamilton, " as a party all head and no body." But
the future Young Irelanders were estimated as un-
skilfully as the future Federalists; for, like them.

THE JOURNALIST. Ill

they grew into a decisive power. Even at that time
there was a surrounding of youngsters who neither
wrote nor harangued, but constituted a sympathetic
chorus, almost as essential to the success of the drama
as the actors themselves. They sang their songs,
repeated their mots^ carried their opinions into
society, and sometimes quite honestly mistook them
for their own.

Whenever men are combined for a large purpose,
good or evil, posterity is apt to select one of them
to inherit all the honour. In the Reformation we
think only of Luther, but without Calvin and Knox
the Reformation might have remained a German
schism. Of the Jesuits the world remembers chiefly
St. Ignatius, but he was far from being the first in
genius, or even in governing power, of that marvellous
company. Among the forerunners of the French
Revolution opinion settles upon Rousseau and Vol-
taire, but Denis Diderot sapped the buttresses of
authority and stubbed the roots of faith with a more
steadfast and malign industry. Wilberforce is hailed
emancipator of the negroes, but without Clarkson and
Zachary Macaulay he would have gone to his grave
without seeing their fetters struck off. Original men
come in groups, and so it was now. Davis was the
truest type of his generation, not because he was most
gifted, but because his whole faculties were devoted to

112 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS.

his work; and because he was not one-sided, but a
complete and consummate man. But the era produced
a crowd of notable persons. Mangan was a truer
poet, but he altogether wanted the stringent will which
made Davis's work so fruitful. Ferguson's literary
range was wider, and his work was more artistically-
handled, but he shrunk from allying himself in aims
and interests with the bulk of the people. MacNevin,
and still more in later times Meagher, uttered appeals
more eloquent and touching, but each of them kindled
his torch at the living fire of Davis. Dillon had, per-
haps, a safer judgment, and certainly a surer apprecia-
tion of difficulties ; but his labours were intermittent.
Most of their separate qualities united in some con-
siderable degree in Davis, and every faculty was
applied with unwavering purpose to a single end,
which ruled his life " like a guiding star above."

Irish history had been shamefully neglected in school
and college, and the young men took up the teaching
of it in the Nation ; not as a cold scientific analysis,
but as a passionate search for light which might help
them to understand their own race and country. When
this attempt began, Irish history was rather less known
than Chinese. A mandarin implied a definite idea ;
but what was a Tanist ? Confucius was a wise man
among the Celestials ; but who was I^loran ? One
man out of ten thousand could not tell whether Owen

THE JOURNAUST. II3

Roe followed or preceded Brien Boroihime j in which
hemisphere the victory of Benburb was achieved ; or
whether the O'Neill who held Ireland for eight years
in the Puritan wars was a naked savage armed with a
stake, or an accomplished soldier bred in the most
adventurous and punctilious service in Europe. They
speedily lighted up this obscure past with a sympathy
which gilded it like sunshine, till the study of our annals
became a passion with young Irishmen. On this teach-
ing Davis constantly strove to impress a precise aim and
purpose. He ransacked the past, not to find weapons
of assault against England, still less to feed the lazy
reveries of seannachies and poets upon legends of a
golden age hid in the mists of antiquity, but to rear a
generation whose lives would be strengthened and en-
nobled by the knowledge that there had been great
men of their race, and great actions done on the soil
they trod; whose resolution and fidelity would be
fortified by knowing that their ancestors had left their
mark for ever on some of the most memorable eras of
European history ; that they were heirs to a litany of
soldiers, scholars, and ecclesiastics, no more fabulous
or questionable than the marshals of Napoleon or the
poets of Weimar ; and to warn them by the light of the
past of the perilous vices and weaknesses which had
so often betrayed our people.

We were warned by the Times^ and a chorus of

114 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS-

smaller critics, that these historical reminiscences
fostered national animosities. Perhaps they did ; but
is there any method of exposing great wrongs which
does not beget indignation against the wronger ? We
were of opinion that writers who habitually employed
the epithet Swiss to signify a mercenary, Greek a
cheat, Jew a miser, Turk a brute, and Yankee a pedlar,
who used the phrase '* Dutch courage" to signify drun-
kenness, and a "Flemish account " to signify deception,
who symbohzed a Frenchman as a fop, and a French
woman as a hag (beldam=belle dame), and who called
whatsoever was stupid or foolish Irish — an Irish argu-
ment being an argument that proved nothing, and an
Irish method a method which was bound to fail-
were scarcely entitled to take us to task for truths
which, however disagreeable, were at least authentic.

The journal alone was not a sufficient agent for this
purpose, and books to fill some of the greater voids in
our history began to appear. The work which the
young men did in this way was of wider scope and
greater permanence than anything they could accom-
plish in the Association. They were slowly, half
unconsciously, laying the foundations of a national
literature. Their first experiment was a little sixpenny
brochure, printed at the Nation office, and sold by the
Nation agents— a collection of the songs and ballads
published during three months, entitled The Spirit of

THE JOURNALIST. II5

the Nation. Its success was a marvel. The Con-
servatives set the example of applauding its ability,
while they condemned its aim and spirit Frederick
Shaw, then leader of the Irish Tories, read specimens
to the House of Commons as a warning of a new
danger. Isaac Butt, his rival in Ireland, made the
little book the main subject of his speech at a Con-
servative meeting in Dublin, and declared the writer
—assuming the book to be the production of one man
instead of a dozen — " deserved the name and had the
inspiration of a poet." And Mr. LeFanu, the most
gifted journalist of the party, taking the prose and
poetry together, pronounced the Nation to be the
most ominous and formidable phenomenon of strange
and terrible times.

"The Nation," he added, "is written with a mascu-
line rigour, and with an impetuous singleness of purpose
which makes every number tell home. It represents
the opinions and feelings of some millions of men, re-
flected with vivid precision in its successive pages, and,
taken for all in all, it is a genuine and gigantic repre-
sentative of its vast party."

This interest, curiously compounded of anger and
sympathy, spread to England. John Wilson Croker,
in the Quarterly Review ^ praised without stint "the
beauty of language and imagery," but declared, in
his habitual slashing style, that "they exhibited the
deadliest rancour, the most audacious falsehoods, and

Il6 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS-

the most incendiary provocations to war." The Times
affirmed that O'ConnelFs mischievous exhortations
were tame compared with the fervour of rebellion
which breathed in every page of these verses. The
echo of those strong opinions ran through the chief
critical and political journals, and the Naval and
Military Gazette added a dash of vitriol to the flame
when it announced that the songs made their way into
the barracks, and were sung at the public houses fre-
quented by Irish soldiers. The newspaper office could
not produce the book fast enough for the demand, and
at an early period I transferred it to Mr. James Duffy,
a publisher then in a small way of business in a by-
street, to whom it was the beginning of great pros-
perit>'. Remembering the precedent of Robert Burns,
who refused to make money by the songs of his
country, we made a free gift of the little book to the
publisher.

The second experiment was a collection of the
orators of Ireland. It was designed to bring into one
series the greatest speeches of the men who fought the
battle of parliamentary independence in the eighteenth
century ; next, the great Irishmen who had served the
Empire with conspicuous ability — Burke, Canning, and
Wellesley; and, finally, of the two tribunes of the
Catholic agitation, O'Connell and Shiel.

Davis began the series with a collection of Curr an's

THE JOURNALIST. II7

speeches, prefaced by a fresh, vigorous, and sparkling
memoir. The book has since run through twenty
editions, and is in the hands of every student of Irish
history. It had to encounter the conceited dogma-
tism which a work of original genius seldom escapes,
but we can read this rash disparagement with some-
thing of the sensation which Brougham's estimate of
Byron, or Jeffrey's of Wordsworth, or John Wilson's
of Tennyson is apt to create in a reader of to-day. It
used to be said with some justice that if you put an
Irishman to roast, another Irishman would turn the
spit. The turnspit on this occasion was Mr. Marmion
Savage, a gentleman who commenced his career at
the Com Exchange declaiming against tithe, and ended
as clerk of the Privy Council. He pronounced judg-
ment on Davis's volume in the Athencsum^ and the
opening paragraph is worth preserving as one of the
curiosities of criticism.

"A greener book than this has not yet issued from
the Green Isle. The cover is greener than the sham-
rock ; the contents greener again ; and the style and
execution are green in the superlative degree. In short,
it is * one entire and perfect emebald,' saving the value
of that precious stone. It must needs be an emanation
from some very green and unripe genius, who sees every
object through a pair of green spectacles; nay, we have
a suspicion that the author is no other Uian the actual
Green Man."

Il8 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS.

MacNevin followed Davis with a collection of the
State Trials in Ireland from 1794 to 1803— the era of
Castlereagh and Carhampton — lighted up with a vivid
introduction. A popular edition of MacGeoghegan's
History of Ireland followed — a valuable book, pub-
lished in Paris by an emigrant priest, — and Barring-
ton's Rise and Fall of the Irish Nation^ and Foreman's
famous Defence of the Courage^ Honour^ and Loyalty
of the Irish — the last edited by Davis.

Every week the journal contained counsel to young
Irishmen on education, discipline, the use they might
make of their lives, and the services they could per-
form for their country, and the same spirit animated
their work in the Association.

" Watch over our historical places," they said ; " they
are in the care of the people, and they are ill-cared.
All classes, creeds, and politics are to blame in this.
The peasant lugs down a pillar for his sty, the farmer
for his gate, the priest for his chapel, the minister for
his glebe. A mill-stream ran through Lord Moore's
Castle, and the commissioners of Gal way have shaken,
and threatened to remove, the Warden's house that fine
stone chronicle of Galway heroism. [A warden of
Galway was the Brutus of Ireland, and sacrificed his
son to his country."] But these ruins were rich posses-
sions. The state of civilization among our Scotic, or
'Milesian, or Norman, or Danish sires, was better seen
from a few raths, keeps, and old coast towns, with the
help of the Museum of the Irish Academy, than from
all the prints and historical novels we have. An old

THE JOURNALIST. II9

castle in Kilkenny, a house in Galway give us a peep
at the artSj the intercourse, the creed, the indoor, and
some of the out-door ways of the gentry of the one,
and of the merchants of the other, clearer than Scott
could, -were he to write, or Cattermole, were he to
paint for forty years. Yet year after year more of our
crosses are broken, of our tombs effaced, of our abbeys
shattered, of our castles torn down, of our cairns
sacrilegiously pierced, of our urns broken up, and of
our coins melted down."

All this work had to be done with a constant watch"
fulness against giving offence to the national leader,
who had small sympathy with the philosophy or
poetry of politics, and a general disrelish of un-
authorized experiments.

The monster meetings went on with unflagging
spirit and still increasing numbers. Many millions of
Irishmen had now been paraded and battalioned as
Nationalists determined at all costs to raise up their
country anew. The influence of a resolute organized
people was tremendous. It made itself felt in every
fibre of the nation, among the most hostile section as
well as the most sympathetic. Here are two or three
significant illustrations. The Repeal members were
required to attend the meetings of the Association, and
in their absence the Government proposed an Arms
Bill of unexampled stringency ; but the public spirit
was alert, and it was resisted by Irish Whigs, led on
this occasion by Lord Clements, Sharman Crawford,

120 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS-

and Smith O'Brien with stubborn persistence. Half
of the session was wasted before it was forced through
the Commons.

When these Irish Liberals had failed in Parliament
they addressed themselves directly to the English
people, inviting them to consider the condition to
which the fatal policy which England supported had
reduced Ireland. The people were poor, estranged,
and exasperated by a long course of vicious legisla-
tion. The labouring population lived habitually on
the verge of destitution. Irish commerce, manufac-
tures, fisheries, mines, and agriculture attested by
their languishing and neglected condition the baneful
effects of misgovernment. Was there any remedy ?

Half a year later a number of Irish Peers, led as of
old by the Duke of Leinster and Lord Charlemont, fol-
lowed the example of the Commoners, and petitioned
Parliament to take the condition of Ireland into
immediate consideration. The use of force, though
it might be effective for the suppression of disorder,
could not remove discontent.

Even the English Whigs did not escape the pre-
vailing influence. A party manifesto was published
in the Edinburgh Review^ revised by Lord John
Russell,* offering among other concessions an annual

* See Select Correspondence of Macvey Napier, then editor
9f the Edinburgh Review.

THE JOURNALIST. T2l

visit of the Queen, and a residence in Ireland long
enough to make the presence of the Sovereign no
unusual element in national life, the holding of parlia-
mentary sessions in Dublin, a provision for middle-
class education by erecting Maynooth into a university,
reform of land tenure, the disestablishment of the
Protestant Church, and a permanent provision for the
Catholic Clergy, and for the maintenance of their
churches. A sum yielding an annual income of three
hundred thousand pounds must be granted for the
purpose of carrying out these reforms.

A more curious and significant evidence of progress
was an Irish Club started in London. A dozen peers,
more than twenty members of Parliament, as many
baronets, knights, or privy councillors, and a con-
siderable muster of artists and literary men united in
the Irish Society. It was to be independent of
religious and political distinctions, and the names of
men so widely divided as Frederick Shaw, Emerson
Tennent, and Colonel Taylor on one side, and
Anthony Blake, D. R. Pigot, and Thomas Redington
on the other, promised that it would be national in a
high sense. Irish artists like Maclise, MacDowell,
John Doyle, and men of letters like Father Prout and
Dr. Croly, gave it an attraction more piquant than rank
can furnish, and it opened with satisfactory prospects.

The land question was more and more debated in

122 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS-

the Nation as the most urgent of Irish grievances, and
one for which redress might perhaps be obtained from
the Imperial Parh'ament.

When the monster meetings had arrayed the bulk
of the nation on his side, and the time for mere
demonstration was over, O'Connell promised that he
would summon a Council of Three Hundred to con-
sider the question of international securities, and form
the nucleus of an Irish Parliament. The young men
took up the project warmly, but not without a secret
apprehension that O'Connell meant it to create alarm
in England rather than to perform the noble work for
which it seemed fit.

The meetings still swelled in numbers, passion, and
purpose. O'Connell's oratory kept measure with the
quick march of the nation. At Davis's birth-place he
used language afterwards known as the "Mallow
Defiance," Speaking of a rumour which attributed
to the Government the intention of suppressing the
movement by force, he said : —

"Do you know, I never felt such a loathing for
speechifying as I do at present. The time is coming
when we must be doing. Gentlemen, you may learn
the alternative to live as slaves or die as freemen. No I
you will not be freemen if you be not perfectly in the
right and your enemies in the wrong. I think I per-
ceive a fixed disposition on the part of our Saxon tra-
ducers to put us to the test. The efi'orts akeady made
by them have been most abortive and ridiculous. In

THE JOURNALIST. 1 25

the midst of peace and tranquillity they are covering
our land with troops. Yes, I speak with the awful de-
termination with which I commenced my address, in
consequence of news received this day. There was no
House of Commons on Thursday, for the Cabinet was
considering what they should do, not for Ireland, but
against her. But, gentlemen, as long as they leave us
a rag of the Constitution we will stand on it. We will
violate no law, we will assail no enemy ; but you are
much mistaken if you think others will not assail you.
(A voice — We are ready to meet them.) To be sure
you are. Do you think I suppose you to be cowards or
fools r

He put the case that the Union was destructive to
England instead of Ireland, and demanded whether
Englishmen mider such circumstances would not insist
on its repeal

"What are Irishmen," he asked, "that they should
be denied an equal privilege ? Have we not the ordinary-
courage of Englishmen? Are we to be called slaves?
Are we to be trampled under foot ? Oh ! they shall
never trample me, at least (no, no). I say they may
trample me, but it will be my dead body they will
trample on, not the living man."

The Repeal Association, to stamp this sentiment on
marble, voted a statue of O'Connell as he spoke at
Mallow, with the final sentence of his declaration
carved on the pedestal, in eternal memory of a great
wrong adequately encountered. The statue was duly
carved, but meantime O'ConnelFs policy has rendered
the motto impossible.

124 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS.

These transactions excited profound interest through-
out the civilized world. The United States sent back
an answer to them in immense meetings held in the
great cities, at which eminent senators, judges, and
statesmen took part. England was warned that if she
coerced Ireland, she would do so at the risk of losing
Canada by American arms. Seward, afterwards
Secretary of State, and John Tyler, then President of
the United States, declared that the Union ought to be
repealed. One of the great meetings sent an address
to France, inviting her to help a nation which had
helped her on a hundred battlefields. France answered
by a memorable meeting in Paris, at which deputies
and journalists took part who before four years had
themselves become the Provisional Government of a
new republic. They offered arms and trained officers
to a country resisting manifest injustice. In these
transactions it became plain that France and America
recognised as a spokesman of the Irish race, not only
O'Connell but the Nation. The writings of the paper
were spoken of in their correspondence, and quoted
in a hundred newspapers from New York to New
Orleans, and were universally translated by the press
of Paris. The attendance at the monster meetings
continued to grow, till it was alleged that at Tara little
short of a million of men met to claim self-govern-
ment for their native country.

CHAPTER V.

THE RECREATIONS OF A PATRIOT. 1 843.

MAN'S character is often best
read in his amusements. He
may pose on the platform, or
in the salon, but in holiday
■ undress he needs must follow
the bent of his nature. At
the very climax of popular
agitatation in the autumn of
1843, a meeting of the British Association was fixed
to be held at Coric, and Davis, as a native of the
county, promised to attend. He proposed at the
same time to take a holiday from work, and employ
it in an extensive tour in Munster and Connaught,
which would enable him to communicate with im-
portant political allies, and probably to make new
friends for the cause. He needed not merely leisure,
but solitude. To be wholly alone at times, disengaged

126 SHORT LIFE OF THOMAS DAVIS.

from the closest friendships and the tenderest domestic
ties, is a necessity to the original and fruitful thinker.
His correspondence during this excursion, with
some help from memoranda which he made at the
moment, enables us to follow him closely. During
the greatest stress of work or travel he was an inces-
sant student, and in his leisure the practice clung to
him. The Paradise Lost and the Transfiguration
of Raphael^ Emerson declares, are results of a note-
book; and Davis has left behind him a bundle of
note-books during his excursions or studies. Un-
happily they are often quite undecipherable ; or, if
legible, phrases which to him were doubtless symbols
of vivid impressions yield small results to any one else.
They were sometimes written in pencil, and, after
half a century, have faded into shadows. When
pen and ink were employed, he trusted so largely to
his memory that the notes constitute a sort of
me?noria technica. He probably felt the truth of the
poet Gray's memorable saying — that half a word set
down at the moment is worth a cart-load of recollec-
tions. But, such as they are, they enable us to watch
the student hiving with loving care the materials which
gave local colour and dramatic character to national
ballads, or furnished the statesman with data on which
opinion was founded. He gathered traditions of his-
toric events where they happened, studied the aspect

THE RECREATIONS OF A PATRIOT. 127

and topography of memorable places — ^there are such
studies of Limerick, Galway, Deny, and Drogheda,
for example, with rude maps and drawings of the
battle-fields. Scraps of local songs and vocabularies
of Irish phrases are interrupted to set down the names
of men who might be useful to the national cause or
who were familiar with local antiquities, notes on the
administration of justice in the provinces, drawings
of old coins, or memoranda of articles to be written
by himself or others.

He travelled by Kilkenny, Waterford, and Cashel,
and reported in a letter to his friend Webb the
official business transacted at Cork : —

" The association meeting was successful for its science
Loth to natives and strangers ; but because the Repealers
and the educated shopkeepers of Cork sustained it, the
coimty Conservatives declined to join it, so the numher
was only six hundred instead of fifteen hundred, as had
been usual. However, we had a thousand at the ball."

In his diary we find his impressions of Dr. Murphy,
the Catholic Bishop, who had collected a great library
which he proposed to bequeath to some public
purpose.

" Dr. Murphy : met me, drove [with him to his"]
house ; some middling pictures and prints. 100,000
vols, (catalogue in Feast-book). 6,000 this year, great
in classics and illustrated books. Buys second-hand ;
gives 5 per cent, to dealers ; does not go to auctions
nor order them j buys much in Belgium ; says that

128 SHORT LIFE OF THOMAS DAVIS-

the convents supplied the great libraries of France and
Belgium. The Bishop said —

"'I was dining with Cardinal Gronsalvi when Canova
arrived with the rescued pictures and statues from Paris.
All rose. Gonsalvi embraced him and saluted him Mar-
quis with a pension of 5,000 crowns a year. He re-
fused. "Oh, his Holiness must not be refused." "Well,
I accept it on condition of its being given to poor
artists in Rome.'""

He heard from the Bishop and others stories of an
eminent sculptor, at that time in Dublin, having recently
returned from Rome. John Hogan was originally a
carpenter, and by force of native genius raised himself
to be one of the greatest artists of his generation in
Europe.

" Hogan ; 2 [of his] chalk drawings at Macroom ;
they are in a carpenter's [named Hogan] ; H. worked

in Mrs. Deane's [as a carpenter] Sir T. D 's [Sir

Thomas Deane, a local architect], mother. After nine
month's vain entreaty, Sir T. got him for Dr. Murphy,
for Mrs. D. Murphy was then about to fit up the
chapel, had the plaster done, and the bracket and
canopies and niches ready ; he got pictures of the
apostles, etc., cut the likeness and drapery, all boldly
but loosely. He has 27 wood figures in that sanctuary,
a half-relief altar — Leonardi's 'Last Supper,' free, clear,
and noble. Carey saw the altar-piece and asked for
the carver. He is a carpenter.' 'Bring him hither.'
Carey took a hand and a Socrates' head to Dublin
Society. They could not, as he was not a pupil, but
they gave hira 25 guineas for the head and hand, and
offered £100 [to start him in an artistic career] if Cork

THE RECREATIONS OP A PATRIOT. 1 29

gave another (see their books). Hogan got £300, gave
£150 to his family, and started for Borne, with many-
letters from Dr. M. ; delivered none of them, but
bought a block, hired lodgings, shut himself up for six
montlis. [A shepherd boy playing on his pipe was his
first success ; ] and then an Italian bag-piper was there to
play for Rome for ever. He was commissioned to make
Dead Christ for Dr. M. He did so, and was allowed
by Dr. M. to exhibit and then sell it in Dublin.
Clarendon Street Chapel has it, but he did another in
Italy. When 'twas opened, after it came from Leghorn,
the head was found unfinished. 'Why?' 'I wish to
prevent jealous people saying I got ItaKan help. I shall
do this here imder their eyes.' (This fine work is now
under the high alter in the Carmelite Church, Clarendon
Street, Dublin.) Mr. J. Murphy has bust of Dr. M.
and himself by H. Dead Christ, large noble man in
full health ; drapery round, fine, and true, but at side
too heavy stone-lying ; head on right shoulder, right
foot over left, elbows on ground, hands on sides,
wedged-up head, neck, flesh. A cemetery angel by him,
deep, gentle, reflective, wing exquisite."

When he left the city for the county Cork he picked
up traditions which, when they were carefully sifted,
might furnish materials for history. Nearly every
great estate in Munster is the result of some great
crime, and he found a notable instance : —

* Beecher's great grandfather came here possessing no-
thing. Young O'DriscoU got him to take care of his house
while he was abroad with his sister. When he came
back Beecher prosecuted him under the Penal Laws (as
a Papist) and got his property.'*

K

130 SHORT LIFE OF THOMAS DAVIS.

"O'Leaiy shot for outla\ny for refusing horse for £5
at Mallow, and Matthew of Thn. on being asked for his
2 fiery chariot horses drove to the Archbishop and read
his recantation."

He looked at the landscape with the eye of a
soldier and a poet : —

"All these Southern heads have castles and as many
are peninsulas ; these castles are on the necks — thus
securing some 20, or 30, or 50 acres for tillage, cattle,
plunder, and stores. There the galleys were beached,
doubtless, in winter [when they were not] plundering
in more gentle seas. All these O'Heas, O'Donovans'
O'Sullivans, Burkes, O'Malleys, O'Loghlens, O'Dris-
coUs, O'Mahonys, etc., were doubtless pirates or sea-
kings (see in Waterford Hist.) O'Dll's alliances and
invasions, Burke the marine, Grace O'Malley's galleys in
1172, privateers in 1645. Thorpe's pamphlets and
coast traditions. [Thorpe's pamphlets are a valuable
collection in the Royal Irish Acaademy.]"

"In Tipperary and Kilkenny, grey eyes, black lashes,
rich brown hair, middle or small size, oval-faced arch
girls ; now dark hair, flashing black eyes, brunette,
sunny cheeks, bearing graceful. Tela girl lovely horse-
woman."

To Pigot he sent a glance at Mount Melleray, the
famous Trappist convent in the Waterford mountains.

"The institution consists of a MrrRED abbot, the only
one in Ireland, one prior, nine other priests, besides
religious and lay brothere — in all about seventy. The
priests, besides their religious duties, are as teachers in
the schools, superintendents of work, etc., and they
alone speak — the rest are eternally silent day and night,

THE RECREATIONS OP A PATRIOT- 131

in and out. They are engaged in tilling their land, and
in the trades necessary to their independence. They
have five hundred and sixty acres on the mountain, of
which over two hundred are under cultivation. They
have a fine garden, highly tilled, and a hot-house, with
vines, flowers, etc. I send you a geranium blossom of
theirs. Until lately they were dependent for many
things ; now they raise their food (vegetables and milk
and butter), grind their com (wheat and rye), make and
mend their own clothes, tools, harness, build their
houses, paint and carve pictures and statues for their
chapel, and are grooms, carpenters, smiths, foresters,
masons, schoolmasters, and wheelwrights. Their school
is new, but not bad. Fancy this abbey, with its tall
wl^te spire and thriving ascetic unnatural community
staring in heaven's face from the side of the great free
lordly wild mountain, and you have Mount Melleray.
They all wear brown gowns and hoods and brogues, save
the priests, who wear white. St. Bernard was their
founder, and they have a fine manuscript of the Psalms
with music in his writing. I have got a most pressing
invitation to go there for some time, and whenever I
like."

In Tipperary, on his downward journey, he found
traditions of scornful and wicked oppression which
have borne bitter fruit in latter times.

"Father F says, I remember Sir John Fitz-

Gerald bidding all the people in Cashel fair kneel, and
they knelt, and he waved his sword over them, walking
through them."

"Pierce Meagher's ancestor was at the wake of Lloyd
of Meldrun, who was his kindest friend. Jacob of Mew-
bam came to young Lloyd, afterwards, with list of

132 SHORT LIFE OF THOMAS DAVIS-

Catholic conspirators. One of them was Meagher, and
the great meeting night was the night of Lloyd's
wake. 'He was at my father's wake that night, and
your informer lies,' says Lloyd. 'Well, we'll leave tttm
out and hang the rest.' 'If you offer to touch one of
them I'll denounce you all.' "

Smith O'Brien's recent proceedings in Parliament
made him a man worth cultivating for public ends ;
and Davis asked Webb to send him an introduc-
tion, Webb being a near kinsman of Mrs. O'Brien.
He went to Kerry chiefly to confer with Maurice
O'Connell, whom he believed more disposed to reso-
lute policy than the other members of his family ; and,
doubtless, he was, before domestic troubles drained
his life of all purpose. He loved and honoured Davis
and longed to share his noble aims, but his will was
a bow unbent for ever.

Here are memoranda, probably of the same date,
containing hints for work and study : —

"I feel more and more that a good novel is the
greatest of works, the natural combination of all objects
and natures, whereas other things are selections from
feelings or subjects, and admit of a magnifying with
consistency, as in Shakespeare ; but it, perhaps, would
be impossible to write consistent a superhuman novel
from the multitude of objects. . . .

"The late owner of Castle R , to preserve it, con-
tracted with a mason to build a wall round it. He did
so with the stones of the castle itself !

"Mr. Hunter states that, in the schools on his own

THE RECREATIONS OF A PATRIOT. 1 33

and Mr. Maxwell's property, the Irish blood is first in
the class, as all his female connections inform him."

At Limerick he met the gifted brother of Gerald
Griffin, author of The Collegians, a novel which
has since rivalled the circulation of Guy Manner-
ing2xA Tom Jones, and he gathered some facts
about that unhappy man of genius.

His correspondence with me during this journey
was naturally on the political business transacted in
Dublin. The young men saw great possibilities in
the project of a Council of Three Hundred, and
immediately looked out for constituencies. Davis
asked me to find him one, preferably in the North.

"I am slow to write directly on the Three Hundred,"
he said. "K the people were more educated I would
rather postpone it for a year; but they would grow
lawless and sceptical, so I fear this cannot be done.
If O'Connell would pre-arrange, or allow others to pre-
arrange a 'decided' pohcy, I would look confidently
to the Three Hundred as bringing matters to an issue
in the best way. As it is, we must try and hit on
some medium. We must not postpone it till Parliament
meets, for the Three Hundred will not be a sufficiently
free and brilliant thing to shine down St. Stephen's
and defy its coercion. Yet we must not push it too
quickly, as the country, so far as I can see, is not
braced up to any emergency. Ours is a tremenduous re-
sponsibility, politically and personally, and we must
see where we are going."

" I am not neglecting the Three Himdred. ' Grattan's
Memoirs' by his son, Hardy's 'Life of Charlemont,'

134 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS-

Walkeb's Magazine (of which there is a copy in the
Association Library) contain materials on Dungannon.
Notice the Catholic Committee of 1792, Wyse, Tone,
Grattan, etc. Tone says 'twas one of the noblest
assemblies he ever saw. Copy the passage. You ought
to print the census sheet I left you, at once, correcting
it by the large volume of the Census which you should
buy and notice, or send to me to notice, and by Cap-
tain Larcom's paper read here. By the way, the Re-
pealers had the whole association here. Who wrote
the ' Ways and Means ? ' * 'Twas excellent. Write to me
soon. . . . You seem to have a turn for genealogy. I wish
you knew my eldest brother, who has the most extra-
ordinary gifts in that way I ever met. There is no
family in Munster but he knows the pedigree of; but,
alas, he is an English-minded man."

I replied : —

"I have secured your return (and your £100) for
county Down. Mr. Doran [Rev. John Doran, P.P.,
Loughbrickland] undertakes to manage it all without
further flapping. I did not consult John O'Connell, for
reasons that I will tell you when you return ; but if
you prefer Dublin and can secure it, you are not bound
to Down — it only waits your convenience. I am glad
you intend to do an anniversary article. Do not forget
the influence of our songs, and popular projects, or
the foreign notice the national question obtained through
the Nation, or the universal adoption of its tone by
the provincial press. I meditate a song upon the same
happy occasion.

"Your report was confirmed — the way the cow killed

* See Voice of the Nation, p. 35, where it is published with the
writer's name.

THE RECREATIONS OF A PATRIOT. 1 35

the hare— by chance. John O'Connell read it to the
Committee, or rather in the Committee, for not a soul
seemed to be listening, as the great man was telling a
story about Watty Cox. Wlien the story and the report
were finished I said I would be happy to move the
adoption of the latter, if I could hope that anybody
knew what it was about ; whereupon O'Connell, who
has the most extraordinary faculty of knowing what is
going on without apparently attending to it, said he
quite agreed with me in approving of it, and would
second the motion. The work was then, of course,
done, and I announced the general fact, assuming that
you would go into detail thereafter."*

About the same time he wrote : —

"MacN 's article [in the Nation] on the Whigs

has given great offence in many quarters. I think to
say truth, it said too much, and looked like a cruel
attack, when the Irish Whigs at least were doing nobly
in the House. Take some opportimity to distinguish
that you did not mean them (S. O'Brien and the like)
in attacking the Whigs, and do not notice anything in
the London Press on it. I speak advisedly. We have
need of tolerants as well as alUes for a while."

Before turning to the west, he wrote to Maddyn : —
"What do the Britishers mean to do with our Three
Hundred? What do the longheads think of it? What
do YOU think of it? I am offered several places in it.
Ought I to go in? I think 'yes,' from poUcy and con-
science. Pray write to me at length, and very soon."

Maddyn strongly dissuaded him from entering the
Council.

* September 27, 1843.

136 SHORT LIFE OF THOMAS DAVIS.

"The Government," he wrote, "Tnll never permit it
to assemble. They xrill put it down, and challenge the
country to resist, and all reasonable men of the Whigs,
Conservatives, and Moderates will approve of the Govern-
ment resolution. By the 1st of March, 1844, it will be
seen that no man will have lost more reputation than
O'Connell, and no man gained more than Peel. I
would strongly advise you not to fetter yourself more
than you are at present. Do not shackle yourself by
assuming responsibilities, while you will not be allowed
t3 retain your own right of decision. . . . All parties
here are ready unsparingly to employ force, if you will
persist in your resolution to plunge into a bloody civil
war. The Irish think Peel is cowed because he holds
back and does not obey the counsels of the ultra Tories.
'Twas so with Pitt in 1790, and subsequently. He did
not go to war until he saw that it was absolutely
necessary ; and the moment he gave the word he re-
gained his popularity with the governing pubHc of
England. Depend upon it that O'Connell will be de-
feated in this business."

During this autumn Sir Charles Trevelyan, a
Treasury official, who had seen service in India, and,
as brother-in-law of Macaulay, had the ear of the
Government, visited Ireland to report on the state
of public feeling. He disbelieved in O'Connell's sin-
cerity, but he found the bulk of the people determined
Nationalists, eager to fight when called upon by their
leader, and the Catholic clergy he believed were in
complete sympathy with them. But he added : —

"There is another estate in the Repeal organization,

THE RECREATIONS OF A PATRIOT- 1 37

of the existence of which the people of England are
imperfectly instructed — the young men of the capital.
As far as the difference in the circumstances of the
two countries admitted, they answered to the 'jeunes
gens de Paris.' They were public-spirited enthusiastic
men, possessed (as it seemed to him), of that crude
information on political subjects which induced several
of the Whig and Conservative leaders to be Radicals
in their youth. They supplied all the good writing,
the histoiy, the poetry, and the political philosophy,
such as it was of the party."

His judgment of O'Connell seemed at the time
shamefully unjust. But the private correspondence
of O'Connell has since been published, and we find
that, after the muster of the nation at Tara, when
the soul of the people was on fire for self-government,
he addressed a letter to Lord Campbell, the party
gladiator who held for a few weeks the office from
which Lord Plunket had been driven, recommending
measures for conciliating Ireland by concessions, and
restoring the Whigs to office.

"Why does not Lord John [Russell] treat us to a
magniloquent [? magnificent] epistle declaratory of his
determination to abate the Church nuisance in Ireland,
to augment our popular franchise, to vivify our new
Corporations, to mitigate the statute law as between
landlord and tenant, to strike off a few more rotten
boroughs in England, and to give the representatives
to our great counties? In short, why does he not
prove himself a high-minded, high-gifted statesman,
capable of leading his friends into all the advantages to

138 SHORT LIFE OF THOMAS DAVIS-

be derived from conciliating the Irish nation, and
strengthening the British Empire ? " *

A better insight into the purpose and hopes of the
young men than Sir Charles Trevelyan had attained,
will be found in a letter which Davis addressed to
the Duke of Wellington, under the signature of a
Federalist, debating the pros and cons of coercion
and concession : —

"This is not the place to examine whether a country
with two thousand miles of coast can be blockaded —
whether a territory of thirty-two thousand square miles
can be occupied by a man a mile — whether the science
of cities would not furnish important supplies to the
strong hands of the peasants — whether a country so un-
even in surface, so cut up by clay ditches, and cabins,
and villages, and little ravines, and inhabited by so
many field-workers, could be traversed by squadron or
field battery — for these questions I must refer others to
Keatinge, Cockburne, Roche Fermoy, the maps, and to
the fore-mentioned list of books. I beg your Grace's
pardon — I refer them to a higher authority on the
military resources of Ireland and on the doctrines of
war than any one living or dead — to the Duke of
Wellington."

He goes on to tell the Duke the state of opinion
among the educated classes, the great factor in all
political changes ; but paints, it must be confessed,
rather his hopes than his experience.

* Letter to Lord Campbell, Sept. 9, 1843,

THB RECREATIONS OF A PATRIOT- 1 39

"I heard hints of a diplomacy embracing rich and
angry spirits, and extending to more than one state.
I heard of a system of retaliation, severe, just, and
systematic enough to insure for Irish insurgents what it
won for Washington and the American rebels — all the
rights of war. The sober organization and the manage-
able fury of the people were dwelt upon. I heard of
field works, and plans for subdividing a mob in a few
hours. I heard of an ingenious and formidable com-
missariat, of American steamers, of Colonial and Chartist
insurrections, of friendly foes and leading genius. Most
of the Conservatives and many of the Whigs said that
an insurrection would occur, and would be suppressed,
unless France interfered, either by going to war at once,
or by winking at private expeditions, such as went to
Greece and Spain. But the rich men among them seem
to dread a defeated as much as a successful insurrection.
The break-up of trade, the terrible shock to English
reputation, and the enormous expenditure which an
insurrection would occasion, were not the only grounds
of their fear.

" Tour lordship will readily understand the connection
between the land tenures here, and insurgent hopes.
The landlords believe that the first act of an insurgent
general would be to proclaim the abolition of rent, and
to bid the people 'take the land, and fight hard to
keep it.' Such an appeal they speak of with terror.
They believe that the thoughtful and adventurous yeo-
men of Leinster would adhere to a cause so advocated.
They think that the Presbyterians, discontented at the
tenancies-at-will, to which, in spite of the rules of the
Ulster settlement, and of common creed and common
right, their tenures are limited, would rise to a man.
They fear that the trampled serfs of Connaught would
learn hope by vengeance, and courage by example ; and

140 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS-

they know that the chivalrous peasantry of the South
would sweep all before them till some great army was
brought on their front, if even that would check their
course."

During Davis's tour in Munster the political work
of the Association, and the educational work of
his colleagues went on vigorously. At MuUaghmast
the Nationalists of Leinster assembled in immense
numbers. The trades and citizens of Dublin met at
Donnybrook, fed on memories of what great cities —
Athens and Rome, Bruges and Ghent, — had done for
liberty ; and the population of the Metropolitan
County was summoned to assemble at Clontarf, a
memorable battle-field. But a trivial incident arrested
the tide of success. The vast troops of horsemen who
attended the monster meetings were named Repeal
Cavalry in some provincial newspapers ; and an indis-
creet secretary of the Clontarf meeting, in issuing the
programme of proceedings, assigned a place to the
"Repeal Cavalry." This political blunder was
promptly corrected by order of O'Connell ; but the
Government, who understood perfectly well that it was
the folly of a subordinate, seized on the incident as a
pretence for suppressing the meeting. A proclama-
tion was issued forbidding it to assemble, and warning
all loyal and peaceful persons from attending.

It is useless to debate in this place what O'Connell

THE RECREATIONS OP A PATRIOT. 141

ought to have done to maintain the right of public
meeting, or what he might have been expected to do
after the specific language of the Mallow defiance.
What he did was to protest against the illegality of the
proclamation, and submit actively and passively to its
orders. He was the leader, alone commissioned to
act with decisive authority, and he warned the people
from appearing at the appointed place. By assiduous
exertions of the local clergy and Repeal wardens they
were kept away, and a collision with the troops
avoided. But such a termination of a movement so
menacing and defiant was a decisive victory for the
Government ; they promptly improved the occasion by
announcing in the Evening Mail their intention to
arrest O'Connell and a batch of his associates on a
charge of conspiring to "excite ill will among her
Majesty's subjects, to weaken their confidence in the
administration of justice, and to obtain by unlawful
methods a change in the constitution and government
of the country, and for that purpose to excite disaffec-
tion among her Majesty's troops."

Next day, Saturday, the 14th of October, O'Con-
nell, his son John, T. M. Ray, Secretary of the Asso-
ciation ; three journalists of the national party, John
Gray, Charles Gavan Duffy, and Richard Barrett ; and
two country priests, Fathers Tyrrell and Tiemey, were
arrested, but admitted to bail to take their trial for
the imputed offence.

142 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS.

When the news of the proclamation reached Davis
at Galway, he saw that the supreme crisis of the cause
had arrived. He knew that O'Connell was pledged
to resist any violation of the right of public meeting
till the aggressor passed over his dead body, and he
was persuaded that the people at the slightest sign
would fly to his assistance. He started straightway
for Castlebar to consult John Dillon on ulterior
measures, and, as he had papers at Bagot Street which
might compromise others, he sent instructions to his
mother to bum them. But, when the arrests provoked
no resistance, he hurried back to Dublin, When he
met his friends we found him painfully discomposed
by the retreat before the proclamation. The gather-
ing confidence of the people in their own strength,
their reliance on the professions of their leader, as well
as the new desire which Davis had done so much to
plant, that their acts might adequately correspond with
their words, were all dissipated. After such an anti-
climax it was impossible to beHeve that a conflict with
England, in which the whole nation would be arrayed
under the green banner, would take place during the
lifetime of O'Connell.

The blow fell heaviest on the young men. In the
words of a native chronicler they had brought " a new
soul into Eire." They had inflamed their own gene-
ration with the noble purpose and desire to endure
suffering and sacrifice for their country, a supreme

THE RECREATIONS OP A PATRIOT- 1 43

service to a people striving to be free, and now the
toil and triumph of a hundred laborious weeks was
squandered in a moment.

It is needless to describe in detail how disastrously
our dreams were scattered, —

"How toppled down the piles of hope we reared."

It was a time of despondency and misery, of rage, and
almost of despair. Davis's first emotion was
expressed in mingled wrath and scorn : —

"We must not fail, we must not fail, however fraud or

force assail ;
By honour, pride, and policy, by Heaven itself ! — we

must be free.

"We called the ends of earth to view the gallant deeds

we swore to do ;
They knew us wronged, they knew us brave, and, all

we asked, they freely gave.

"We promised loud, and boasted high, 'to break our

country's chains or die ; '
And should we quail, that country's name will be the

synonym of shame.

"Earth is not deep enough to hide the coward slave

who shrinks aside ;
Hell is not hot enough to scathe the ruflaan wretch who

breaks his faith.

" But — calm, my soul ! — we promised true her destined

work our land shall do ;
Thought, courage, patience will prevail I we shall not

fail— we shall no fail ! "

144 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS.

' Up to this time Davis's policy might be expressed
in the simplest formula. He desired that the passion
and purpose of the people should be raised to the scale
of 1782, when England would again yield to the will
of a united nation, or, if she would not yield, that the
Repealers should do what the Volunteers would
assuredly have done, fight for the liberty denied to
them. When these hopes disappeared, his first thought
was to quit the Repeal Association for ever. He
would serve Ireland in some other field, for a great
purpose is like a great river, dammed at one point it
forces its way by some other path towards its unchang-
ing goal.

After repeated conferences, we resolved to accept
the situation which O'Connell had created, and turn
it to account in preparing for the future. While
he lived it was plain nothing could be done,
everything might and must be done hereafter.
From that time the energy of the young men
was employed in projects of education and discipHne.
Between the arrest of O'Connell and the era of the
famine and the French Revolution, the Nation
swarmed with projects fostering a lofty but not im-
practicable nationality. The fruition of our hopes
was admitted to be distant, but it might be made
more sure and more precious by a wise use of the
interval.

THE RECREATIONS OF A PATRIOT. 14$

The arrest of O'Connell was quickly followed by
his trial. That transaction can only be glanced at in
a memoir of Thomas Davis. It proved a signal con-
summation of the system of misgovernment on which
he made war, and rendered its hidden iniquity intel-
ligible to Europe and America. The Catholic chief
of a Catholic nation was tried in a Catholic city before
four judges and twelve special jurors among whom
there was not a single Catholic. But among the four
Irish judges there was an Englishman, and among the
twelve Irish jurors there was another of the same
race and opinions.

The trial lasted five and twenty days, and at every
stage was marked by the infringement of the settled
law or established practice governing trials of this
nature. At the close the Chief Justice charged for a
conviction with what proved to be illegal violence ;
and a jury of partisans, as carefully selected as the
juries which tried the State prisoners of the Stuarts,
found a prompt verdict against all the traversers of
whom one had only attended a single meeting of the
Association and been a member barely five days.*

The prosecution brought a great accession of funds
and a large body of recruits to the Repeal party. The
most notable recruit was William Smith O'Brien. He

* The story of the trial is told in detail in Young Ireland^
Book 2nd,

146 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS.

was younger son of a house famous in Irish annals,
since more than a century before the English invasion.
He was a man of good estate, long discipline in Par-
liament and public life, of active intellect, but, above
all, of universally acknowledged probity and disin-
terestedness. He was received with enthusiasm, and
immediately became by common consent the second
man in the movement.

Between the verdict and the sentence, O'Connell
was urged by Whig friends to visit England, and pro-
mised a significant ovation. He might help them to
overturn Peel, and if this could be done promptly, he
would never be called up for judgment. But the
most serious of the National party greatly dreaded the
experiment. O'Connell, as they knew, stood between
two dangers. He was strongly possessed with the
apprehension that Peel would improve his victory by a
Coercion Act, enabling him to suppress the Associa-
tion and forbid public meetings. And he was sur-
rounded by Whigs of the official class, wooing him
back to the bosom of that party. Immediately after
the verdict he went the length of proposing in com-
mittee to dissolve the Repeal Association ; and this
disaster was only averted by the young men declaring
that they could not follow him into a new association if
the existing one was sacrificed to a panic. O'Connell
was made to realise, almost for the first time, that a

THB RECREATIONS OP A PATRIOT- 1 47

new class had grown up about him, who were his faith-
ful and zealous allies, but would never be his servitors
or henchmen.

O'Connell went to England, and was rapturously
welcomed in the House of Commons by the Whig
opposition ; went to an Anti-Corn Law League meeting
at Covent Garden Theatre, and was the hero of the
occasion ; was invited to public meetings in various large
towns in the north, and to a public dinner in London.
But what his English sympathisers claimed on his
behalf was such justice to Ireland as would supersede
Repeal. O'Connell's language before his English
audience was not reassuring ; and he alone of all men
could sacrifice the National cause. He could no
longer induce the people to retreat openly, as in
1834, but he might render success impossible during
his lifetime. Davis was deeply pained and
alarmed. He wrote a letter to John O'Connell, in-
tended as usual for his father's eyes, and his grief
and fear pierce through its courteous and mode-
rated phrases.

"I do not, and cannot suppose that your father ever
dreamt of abandoning Repeal to escape a prison, yet
that ia implied in aU the Whig articles. If he had such
a puipose, this partial conciliation of Leaguers and demi-
Cliariists would not accomplish it. Peel, not Sturge,
wieldd the judgment. Nothing but a dissolution of the

148 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS-

Association would, we are directly told, prevent the
sentence. To dissolve the Association would be to
abdicate his power, and ruin his country.

. . . "Then, why should your father embarrass his
future Bepeal policy by a sojourn in England, and still
more by identifying us with the English as if he were
(still) a Precursor and sought to cement the Union, not
dissolve it? ... If this continues we shall have neither
a Repeal agitation nor a Liberal Government, whereas
a vigorous pursuit of Repeal now would retain the one
and give the only chance of the other."

The private correspondence of Davis was rarely
more extensive and varied than at this period. He
wrote to Maddyn in the interest of a poet whom we
all cherished.

" I think you were a reader of the Univeesity Maga-
zine. If so, you must have noticed the 'Anthologia
Germanica,* 'Leaflets from the German Oak,' 'Oriental
Nights,' and other translations, and apparent transla-
tions of Clarence Mangan. He has some small salary
in the College Library, and has to support himself and
his brother. His health is wretched. Charles Duffy
is most anxious to have the papers I have described
printed in London, for which they are better suited
than for Dublin. Now, you will greatly oblige me by
asking Newby if he will publish them, giving Mangan
£50 for the edition. If he refuse, you can say that
Charles Duffy will repay him half the £50 should the
work be a failure. Should li^ still declare against it,
pray let me know soon what would be the best way of
getting some payment and publication for Mangan' s
papers. Many of the ballads are Mangan's own, and
are first-rate. Were they on Irish subjects he would

THE RECREATIONS OF A PATRIOT. 1 49

be paid for them here. They ought to succeed in
London nigh as well as the 'Prout Papers.' "

Maddyn doubtless did his best, but he did not
succeed, and the greatest poet of his generation lived
and died unknown to London publishers. Even in
Dublin his poems only got published by one of his
friends advancing jCs^ to James M^Glashen, whose
magazine they had enriched.

The Citizen on which Davis had spent so much
care and pains, which a few months earlier he was
ready to prefer to the Nation as a national organ, was
staggering towards a final fall. In April he wrote to
Madd3rn : —

"Our poor magazine is really dead at last. The ex-
pense had kept increasing, and the sale diminishing,
and it was necessary to stop. The amphibious politics
of the magazine, the high price, and unequal ability
were enough to sink anything. The publishers were
careless and without influence, and the perpetual change
of size and price most absurd."*

Other educational projects were pushed on vigor-
ously. Davis negotiated successfully between James
Duffy, by this time the recognized publisher of the
party, and the author's brother, for a uniform edition
of the national novels of Gerald Griffin, and for a
new edition of Dr. R. R. Madden's United Irish-

• 61 Bagot Street, April 13, 1843.

150 SHORT LIFE OF THOMAS DAVIS.

men. And, at the same time, I induced Mr. Duffy to
accept a manuscript novel from William Carleton, up
to that date a name odious to Catholic booksellers ;
and Valentine McClutchy marked a new departure
in the career of a man of genius. O'Connell's
Memoir of Ireland^ Native and Saxon^ had been
originally published in America, and the European
copyright was presented by the author to O'Neill
Daunt, on whom the labour of collecting the
materials had chiefly fallen \ and I persuaded James
Duffy to purchase it at three hundred pounds — a liberal
price for a volume to be published at a couple of
shillings. A Pictorial History of Ireland consist-
ing of coloured lithographs by Henry MacManus,
with short biographical or historical illustrations by
O'Callaghan, proved unhappily a failure — the only
complete collapse among the projects of the party.

The signs of intellectual success, which were dis-
cernible on all sides, have been described elsewhere
in language which it will be convenient to borrow : —

"Books upon the history and condition of Ireland
were now published in France, Prussia, and Belgium,
and portraits of the conspirators were to be found in
every town and village between the Atlantic and the
Pacific, and in every great city on the continent of
Europe. More than a quarter of a century later,
when these transactions were nearly forgotten by
a new generation in Ireland, I was startled to find for

THE RECREATIONS OP A PATRIOT- 151

sale under one of the piazzas of Turin a large lithograph
designated * Capi e Promotori della Questione Irelan-
dese' — being no other than the convicted conspirators
of 1844.

"The Association, in pursuance of its new policy,
offered a prize for the best essay on a Constitution for
Ireland, and exhorted competitors to remember that
'the difficulties of the case must not be evaded, but
frankly stated, and the means specified by which they
might be best met.' The Celtic race, though obstinate
in its habits, is very susceptible of discipline ; no
peasant girl so speedily acquires ease and intelli-
gence by living among the cultivated classes. The
enthusiasm of the time which had enabled an entire
nation to become water-drinkers would, it is hoped,
enable them to submit to other discipline and other
sacrifices. It was admirable to see how young men of
all ranks entered into this idea. This progress was
obvious ; but there was progress more important which
could not be measured. Davis possessed the rare
faculty of exciting impatience of wrong without awaken-
ing the deadly hatred of those who profit by it ; and
it was only in after years men came to know how
deeply the new ideas penetrated among cultivated Pro-
testants. Joseph Le Fanu was the literary leader of
the young Conservatives, and Isaac Butt their political
leader; both were at this time engaged, privately and
unknown to each other, in writing historical romances
which would present the hereditary feuds of Catholics
and Protestants in a juster light to their posterity.
Samuel Ferguson, more essentially a man of letters and
more indisputably a man of genius than either, broke
through the hostile silence of the Dublin IjNTVERsmr
Magazine, by predicting with generous exaggeration
that, if no untoward event interrupted their career,

152 SHORT LIFE OF THOMAS DAVIS-

the time would come when the national writers in
Dublin would be read with something of the same en-
thusiasm in Paris as men in Dublin were reading
B6ranger and Lamartine. Even in Ulster, the home of
prejudice in latter times, they had reason to know that
their songs found favour, and, like Moore's, were heard
in unwonted places. And in the stronghold of bigotnr,
in the office of the Evening Mail, at the feet of the
astute parson who directed ite politics, there was grow-
ing up a lad who in a few years broke away from
hereditary prejudice to become the laureate of Irish
trenson." *

Before this time Dillon had ceased to write in the
Nation^ except on an occasional spurt ; MacNevin
took his place, and gay banter and persiflage suc-
ceeded X.0 philosophical speculation and humanized
Benthamism. But he was not idle ; he was a con-
stant critic on his friends, and his lenient and sympa-
thetic strictures sank deep.

Of the Nation of this period Davis has written,
" Duffy and I wrote most of the paper; " but he wrote
much more than I did, as the business of administra-
tion fell exclusively on me. A modem editor, some-
times, like the leader of an orchestra, never plays a
bar, but is content to direct the movement and
determine the time of his band. This was not my
idea of the duties of the position, I wrote as much

* Young Ireland^ bk. ii., chap. iv.

THE RECREATIONS OF A PATRIOT- 1 53

as an office permitted which involved a huge corres-
pondence and a constant supervision of whatever was
published, that the character of the journal might be
guarded as scrupulously as a gentleman guards his
personal honour.

The verdict against the State prisoners was not
followed, as we have seen, by immediate punishment,
the sentence being postponed, according to practice,
until the opening of next term. In the interval
eminent lawyers at the English and Irish bar pro-
nounced the proceedings to be illegal in essential
particulars, and advised an appeal to the House of
Lords by writ of error. O'Connell, when he returned
from his English expedition, found the people ex-
asperated by the idea of his imprisonment, and
attempted to tranquilize opinion by a device which
like an accommodation bill, helped to swell his liabi-
Hties to an impossible total. *' Give me," he said,
" but six months of peace, and I will give you my
head on a block if we have not a parliament in
College Green."

Davis reported to his friend Pigot the state of
aflfairs in Dublin at this period.

" The newspapers will tell you the news. Tour Whig
friends are wrong. There is, at last, a dogged spirit in
this country which will tell in any way we have to use
it. The only danger is that "the sudden news of

154 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS-

O'Connell's imprisonment, which was not expected, may
cause some petty rows.

" 0'C[onneD] and Duflfy are in good health and spirits,
and they are the most important [of the Repeal con-
victs]."

Davis esteemed Wolfe Tone to be the most saga-
cious Irishman born in the eighteenth century. He
projected a union of Catholics and Protestants in the
distracted country, and accomplished his design in
the United Irishmen. He landed in France without
credentials or money, and launched a French ex-
pedition against the British power in Ireland, which,
like the Armada, failed, only because it was scattered
by a hurricane. Tone's name was familiar to students,
but, though he had a monument in the United States,
there was no memorial of his services in the land for
which he died. A few friends at this time subscribed
funds to place a tombstone on his grave in Bodens-
town cemetery with this inscription written by
Davis : —

" Theobald Wolfe Tone,

Bom 20th June, 1763;

Died 19th November, 1798,

Fon

IRELAND."

On May 30, 1844, the traversers were brought up
for judgment. They claimed to stand out till the writ
of error was tried by the House of Lords ; but they

THE RECREATIONS OF A PATRIOT- 155

were immediately sentenced to fine and imprisonment,
and sent to Richmond Bridewell. The metropolitan
prisons were under the control of the Dublin corpora-
tion, and by their connivance the imprisonment
amounted to mere detention in a country-house with
handsome and extensive gardens. The governor and
deputy -governor were authorized to let their official
residences to the prisoners. We had separate suites
of rooms, our own servants, a common table, which
was rendered luxurious by gifts of venison, fish, game,
and hot-house fruits, and the unrestricted society of
our friends. O'Connell proposed to write his memoirs
in this retirement, and the journalists worked unre-
strictedly at their profession. John O'Connell, who
liked to play at journalism, set up a Richmond Prison
Gazette, consisting chiefly of banter and pasquinades
on the prisoners by each other ; and we gave audience
to sympathisers on fixed days, and had a conference
with Smith O'Brien on the business of the Association
twice a week.

During the weary progress of the State trial, Davis
spoke to me for the first time of a long retirement fi-om
the Nation, He would travel, he would employ him-
self in historical or pohtical studies, but he doubted
if there was any useful or honourable work for him at
Conciliation Hall. These designs, as we shall see,
were not altogether relinquished, but his fidelity to

156 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS-

O'Brien and to his more intimate associates, and the
necessity which a strong man feels to face the danger
nearest at hand kept him at his post, and to do his
best while on duty was the practice of his life. He
made suggestions to the counsel of the traversers,
especially to Whiteside, on the historical defence
relied on, which proved of substantial value.

A design which he long cherished was to write a
history of Ireland. It was a great want. There was
no history which could be put into the hands of a
student or an inquirer without shame, and no one was
so fit as he for the task. But its chief attraction for him
was the escape it would afford him from Conciliation
Hall, and his friends, who knew that he would leave
a fatal void in the national ranks, discouraged the
design. He was engaged in work which was not
indeed higher, for a Prescot or a Thierry is one of the
greatest gifts Providence could bestow upon Ireland,
but was far more urgent. It would have been a bad
economy of life to lay down his habitual task, and
seclude himself from the interests of the hour, even for
such a purpose ; yet this is what he desired to do. In
the middle of the State trials he pressed the project
on me for the second or third time.

"My Deae Duttt,

" I think it better for me to begin my history at
once, and give the next five weeks exclusively to it,

THE RECREATIONS OP A PATRIOT- 1 57

and I can work for the same time in summer for you,
which will transfer the term of our arrangement to the
beginning of July instead of the end of May. I can be
much more useful to you then than now ; and, at any
rate, I know that, as it will convenience me, you will
manage without me for a while.

..." I think that, obliged as you are to be in court,
it would be most easy for you to write the State Trial
articles, and that it would prevent your getting idle or
ennuy^ at court. You ought to rise and breakfast at
seven, and take half an hour's run before you go to the
court, and, in fact, resolve to lead a most fresh vigorous
life to sustain you against Qui Tam's speeches [Qui Tarn
was a nickname for the Attorney-General]. I'll see you
at court to-morrow."

Some weeks later he returned to the subject : —

"Will you or MacNevin," he wrote to me, "deal
with the Debate? My mother's sister is dying in our
house, and I cannot bring myself to this work.

"And now I want to know could you postpone the
second half of my engagement with the Nation, until
autumn, or entirely? I know this is a very unreason-
able request. But I find that I must either give up
the notion of writing the history, or absolutely stop
writing for the Nation- during the spring. Would not
the sum you agreed to give me procure a sufficient
variety of other writing to compensate for the absence
of my harum-scanmi articles? But do not decide
hastily. I am in a very sobered mood, and feel doubts,
serious doubts, of my ability to write the history at
all. But I shall speak to you next week of this."

My remonstrance, however, and the intractable
difficulties of the case, induced him to modify his plan

158 SHORT LIFE OF THOMAS DAVIS-

into the project of a history in eras, each era treated
by a separate writer. Among his papers I find a note
of the latter design : —

"'History of the Pale,'— C. G. D.

"'The Civil Ware,' i.e. from end of Pale to Crom-
well's, and the Acts of his Parliament qttoad Ireland, —
T.D.

'"Patriot Parliament,' 1689 to 1792, and from 1792
to 1800,— T. D. ; 1800 to 1844,— D. O. M."

But three men can no more write history to the
accompaniment of a State trial than one man. In
the end it was determined to begin modestly, and put
off the larger design for calmer times. The Com-
mittee of the Repeal Association were induced to offer
a prize for a school history of Ireland, and I find
among his papers a letter discussing this project : —

"I wish you would consider these two suggestions
about the proposed history while the notice is still un-
published.

"1. It ought to come down to the Union, and no
later. If it come to the present time, you will have
odious and lying exaggerations about O'Connell, and,
what is worse, injustice to the other men engaged in
the Catholic Agitation. Depend upon it there will be
no avoiding this, but by stopping the history at the
Union. Moreover, proceedings so recent -will occupy
such an undue share of the book as to crush out more
material facts. Let the O'Connell Agitation be glorified
in a book published for the special purpose, and written
by Dr. Stephen Murphy !

THE RECREATIONS OP A PATRIOT- 1 59

"2. Eight months is obviously too short a period to
write a history in. Take an average writer, and he
would need three months to collect his materials, three
months to arrange and digest them, and, if he wrote
the book in three months more it would be at the rate
of a hunt. This would be nine months. But as a
writer is a man and not a steam engine, you would
need to throw in a couple of months for relaxation and
his other employments. He may be a farmer (John
Keogh's grandson), an attorney (Mitchel), a doctor
(Cane), or some other man with his hands full of work,
and it is surely more important to have a good book
than to have one a few months before the seasonable
time. I think you ought to allow a year for a book
that you intend to be permanent and standard; but if
it is desirable to avoid so long a delay, fix the 1st of
March instead of the first of January, 1846. This will
only postpone the book two months — nothing to the
Association, everything to the writer plunging hopelessly
through his last chapters."*

While he still meditated writing the history im-
mediately, he had correspondence with Maddyn and
John O'Donovan, the antiquary, which is of permanent
interest, though perhaps the latter permits his opinion
to be a little too much tainted with jealousy of a rival,
and quite inferior, translator from the Gaelic.

O'Donovan wrote to him : —

''Having heard that you are engaged on a history of
the English Invasion of Ireland, I beg to say that I am
anxious to show you some notes of mine on certaui

* Puffy to Davis.

l6o SHORT LIFE OF THOMAS PAVIS-

facts connected with this period of Irish history. The
translation of the 'Annals of the Four Masters,' pub-
lished by Mr. Geraghty, though put into readable
English by Mangan, is full of errors, and you "will find
it very unsafe to trust it. ... I see that Mr. Duffy
has made a slight allusion to the stiffness of my trans-
lations from the Gaelic, because I do not know English.
I know English about six times better than I know
Irish, but I have no notion of becoming a forger, Hke
MacPherson. The translations from Irish by Mangan,
mentioned by Mr. Duffy, are very good ; * but how
near are they to the literal translations furnished to
Mangan by IVlr. Curry? Are they the shadow of a
shade? Mr. Duffy speaks as if Mangan had translated
directly from the original ! But the world is now too

knowing for siDy assertions of this kind It may

be useful just now to talk of long faded glories ; but
it is my opinion that we have but few national glories
to boast of in our history, which only proves that,
though we were vigorous and partially civilized, we
never had any national wisdom. Let me conclude by
one remark, that it is my opinion that the Nation
newspaper, even though it is no child of the tribe of
Dan, has done more to liberalize the Irish and implant
in the minds of the Anglo-Irish and Ibemo-English
the seedlings of national union, than all the histories
of Ireland ever written, and that, if it continues to
live as long more as it has already lived, without
flinching from the noble principles it has hitherto main-
tained, its effects on the national mind will not be
easily removed. I wish I could boast of our having
had such literature in the days of Cormac Mac Art, or
even Brian Boru."

* Ballad Poetry of Ireland. The stiff translations alluded
to were Hardiman's, not O'Donovan's.

THE RECREATIONS OP A PATRIOT. l6l

On a detached sheet of his diary, without date, I
found a significant entry, which, as I conjecture,
belongs to this period. He had never travelled,
and he longed to obtain the practical acquaintance
with races and institutions, and with art and political
geography, which travel alone supplies. It was only
at this period of his short public life that he could
have withdrawn himself from his engagements for six
months, and he still feared that there would be a long
interval of timid and wavering counsels at Conciliation
Hall, when he would be best employed in training
himself for the future.

"Write for Natiox till August, then Scotland and
Norway for two months (£50), Hamburg, Prussia,
Munich, Austria, Venice, Switzerland, Paris, Turin,
Italy, Spain, and home ; £250 or £300 in all. Or go
in June to Scotland, Hamburg, Berlin, Munich, Vienna,
Trieste, Venice, Switzerland ; in all, three months :
then September and half October in France, half
October, November, and half December in Italy, home
for Christmas : in all, six months. Grood ! Morning
letters to Dillon and Duffy."

But the imprisonment opened an era and an op-
portunity which put these dreams to flight

CHAPTER VI.

THE STATESMAN. 1 844.

'CONNELL and a half dozen
selected agitators were locked up
in Richmond bridewell, and now
the critical question arose, Could
the agitation live without the
agitators? It is a strange craze
of English politicians to believe that discontent in
Ireland depends upon the action of this man or that,
instead of springing perennially from the condition of
the people. It is a power which may be regulated
and disciplined, indeed, but it is no more created by
human skill than one of the unintermittent forces of
nature. It was now about to become more vigilant
and formidable, more patient and determined after
defeat, than it had been at the height of the monster
meetings.

The new leader, Smith O'Brien, was a man of good

THE STATESMAN. 163

capacity, careful training, and large experience in
public affairs. His manners were a little rigid and
formal, and his utterance too deliberate for Celtic taste,
but his generous heart kept him young and fresh. He
was ready to compete with his juniors in labour and
to surpass them in sacrifice. As a scion of a great
historic house descended from King Brian, the
Alfred of Ireland, and a member of Parliament of
unstained probity and recognised success, he occu-
pied a unique position. He was not only the
greatest recruit the cause had won, but he created the
hope of a decisive movement among the class to
which he belonged. O'Connell had proclaimed him
his personal representative, and the mouthpiece of
the national cause during the imprisonment ; and
O'Brien devoted every faculty of his being to the
task imposed upon him. He loved to be surrounded
by men of probity and capacity, and had no jealousy
of their gifts. He had large belief and confidence in
Davis, who speedily came to bear the same relation to
him that Alexander Hamilton bore to Washington.
He formulated the policy of the ofl5cial chief, supple-
mented his projects with kindred proposals of his
own, and clothed their common purpose in the per-
suasive language of genius. O'Brien visited O'Connell
and the State prisoners almost daily, consulted them
on his plans that nothing might be done which had

1 64 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS-

not the assent of the imprisoned leader, but his own
character, and that of Thomas Davis, were soon
broadly stamped on the national movement.

Davis for the first time had a free field for his policy,
and a direct control of public affairs, and we are able
to judge of his gifts as a statesman. There was no
more thought of travel or retirement ; no more de-
spondency : like a vigorous young tribune called from
the ranks of Opposition to be a Minister of State, he
began to act and direct like one who had found his
proper work, and his influence was soon felt in every
province of public aff"airs. His policy was ready for
the hour and for the generation. He had lived in
solitude with the great thinkers, and was accustomed
to note the currents and undercurrents which control
opinion, to note the forces at work to-day, and to
foresee the forces which would be at work to-morrow.

A parliamentary committee, organized by O'Brien
during the State trial, now completed a series of
reports dealing with the main branches of the national
question in an exact and practical manner, like men
who might soon be called upon to exercise the functions
of a national Government. Somewhat later, O'Brien
discovered that these political studies had excited
interest among a class usually cold and sceptical —
the gentlemen who sit on both sides of the Speaker's
chair.

THE STATESMAN. 1 65

" I find," he wrote to Davis, " that our reports have
produced in the minds of the English members an
extraordinary effect, and that my notion of making the
Repeal Association an introductory legislature has been
completely realized. Every intelligent M.P. says that
they are calm, able, and most useful."

As agencies for local action, Repeal Reading Rooms
were multiplied. There were already three hundred :
it was determined to increase them to three thousand ;
and they were directed to contest every elective office
in the interest of Repeal, with candidates of the best
character and capacity obtainable. Though the main
agency relied upon was education, it was not merely
the education of books, but still more the education of
action and responsibility. To plant opinion and create
habits, is to form men, but discipline in public duties
alone can form citizens ; and corporations, boards of
guardians, public schools, and colleges, if occupied by
men of public spirit, might help —

"To gather up the fragments of our State,
And in its cold, dismembered body breathe
The living soul of empire."

Davis rarely spoke in the Association, but his friends
O'Brien, Dillon, MacNevin, Barry, and O'Gorman
were often in the tribune, and gave a tone of confi-
dence to debate, to which it had been a stranger of
late. The Repeal members were summoned to attend

1 66 SHORT LIFE OF THOMAS DAVIS.

the weekly meetings at Conciliation Hall, and the
leading Repealers in the provinces came up in batches
for the same purpose, carrying addresses to the State
prisoners. Preparations were begun for a general
election, and candidates of honour and capacity, fit to
be the spokesmen of a nation, were sought for. What
sort of representatives the new men wanted was not
left in doubt. The existing members had been elected
before the country was awakened on the national
question, and were for the most part despicable in
character and capacity. As missionaries of a subject
nation to a dominant one, they were like Lascars sent
to convert Brahmins. Davis, in lieu of speaking in
Conciliation Hall, wrote on the subject in the Nation
with admirable frankness : —

"If our members were a majority in the House,"
he said, " it might not be very moral, but at least it
would have some show of excuse, if we sent in a flock
of pledged delegates to vote Repeal, regardless of their
powers or principles ; though even then we might find
it hard to get rid of the scoundrels after Repeal
was carried, and when Ireland would need virtuous
and unremitting wisdom to make her prosper. . . . We
want men who are not spendthrifts, drunkards,
swindlers, — we want honest men — men whom we would
trust with our private money or our family's honour ;
and sooner than see faded aristocrats and brawling
profligates shelter themselves from their honest debtors
by a Repeal membership, we would leave Tories and

THE STATESMAN. 167

Whigs undisturbed in their seats, and strive to carry-
Repeal by other measures."*

The tone of strict and haughty discipline, designed
to make the people fit to use and fit to enjoy liberty,
was illustrated in the method of dealing with a public
riot at this time.

" We have heard with surprise and anger that a
house in Kilkenny, belonging to one of the jurors in
the State Trials, has been wrecked.

" Such an outrage is an outrage against law, which
we hope and believe the law will sharply punish.

"It is much worse — it is a direct violation of the
principles of the agitation— it is a gross breach of
Repeal discipline — it is a crime against Ireland.

" If a soldier, no matter from what motive, rushes
from his rank in battle, he is, very properly sabred
or shot instantly. If we had the men who perpetrated
this outrage before us, and a clear field, we should
just as unhesitatingly cut them down.

"If we are to carry Repeal — ^if this is not to be
another of these damnable failures that have disgraced
our intellect and our character — there must not be one
other popular crime. The Irish people deserve to
rot in slavish poverty if they will not keep the dis-
cipline under which they are enlisted."

And he taught the rationale of this rigid discipline
in language of transparent plainness : —

"We are not men who bid the people to expect
Repeal in the change from leaf to fruit in any year,

• Nation^ June 29, 1844.

1 68 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS.

We have never said it was certain. It is not certain ;
for if the people do not persevere ^^ith a dogged and
daily labour for knowledge and independence they will
be slaves for generations. It is not at hand, for the
Protestants must be in our array, or foreign war must
humble our foe ; Ireland must be united, or our
oppressor in danger, ere we can succeed by moral
force ; but we ask those who require knowledge, dis-
cipline, and civic wisdom as guarantees for our fitness
for nationality — Has not Ireland done something to
solve their doubts and satisfy their demands ? "

Like Swift, he sought to arrest the ear of the Pro-
testant democracy by associating their party tunes
with generous and patriotic sentiments.

"'Fruitful our soil where honest men starve;
Empty the mart, and shipless the bay ;
Out of our want the Oligarchs carve ;
Foreigners fatten on our decay !

Disunited,

Therefore bUghted,
Ruined and rent by the Englishman's sway;

Party and creed

For once have agreed —
Orange and Green will carry the day !

Boyne's old water,

Red with slaughter !
Now is as pure as an infant at play;

So, in our souls,

Its history rolls,
And Orange and Green will carry the day ! "

One of the hardest tasks an Irish leader could
attempt was to teach his countrymen to respect the

THE STATESMAN. 169

law in a country where the law was so often an instru-
ment of torture, but Davis did not shrink from the
attempt, for he knew that deference for authority is an
essential basis of good citizenship, and that France
had tossed in unrest for a century because she re-
membered too exclusively the abuses of a power
shamefully misused.

"It has been our fondest aim," he wrote at this
time, "to shelter the administration of the law from
suspicion. Coarse, and criminal, and crude as it is, we
had rather see it observed in the sincerity of a delu-
sive confidence in its integrity, than see wronged men
loose themselves from its obligations, and take venge-
ance into their own hands, or weak men bowing to it
with slavish fear."

To complete the records of public duties which
Davis taught, it will be necessary to cite here language
which he employed somewhat later to rebuke agrarian
crime in the South, language in which the sternness of
an indignant judge is mitigated by the passionate
tenderness of a father who sees his children misled to
their ruin.

"The people of Munster are in want — will murder
feed them? Is there some prolific virtue in the blood
of a landlord that the fields of the south will yield a
richer crop where it has flowed? Shame, shame, and
horror! Oh, to think that these hands, hard 'with
innocent toil, should be reddened with assassination I

lyo SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS.

Oh, bitter, bitter grief, that the loving breasts of Mun-
ster should pillow heads wherein are black plots, and
visions of butchery, and shadows of remorse ! Oh,
woe unutterable, if the men who abandoned the sin
of drunkenness should companion with the devil of
murder ; and if the men who last year vowed patience,
order, and virtue, rashly and impiously revel in crime !

"But what do we say? Where are we led by our
fears/ Surely Munster is against these atrocities —
they are the sins of a few — the people are pure and
sound, and all will be well with Ireland. 'Tis so, 'tis
so ; we pray God 'tis so ; but yet the people are not
without blame ! "

The new policy did not long escape notice. Some
of the best informed of the English journals pronounced
that the agitation had become far more formidable and
menacing than in its boisterous days, for it was now
sincere and practical, and the extremest of the Orange
journals at home declared that the modeiation of the
leaders was a cover for the worst purposes.

Taifs Magazine was at that time the chief organ of
cultured Radicalism in Great Britain, and its editor
was among the first to recognise the change. Two
months after the imprisonment had commenced, he
published this remarkable estimate of the reorganised
movement : —

" In Ireland, agitation goes on with a quiet, self-
assured strength, that seems remarkably independent
of extraneous excitement. The old English notion —

THE STATESMAN. I7I

we suspect still the prevalent one — of Irish patriots and
agitators, as being a herd of boastful and frothy
rhetoricians, is now ludicrously false. They are most
careful and earnest men of business. They rejoice in
their strength, but it is with fear and trembling. With
the exulting consciousness of power that men must feel
who hold in their hands the allegiance, and sway the
volition of a nation, they seem to live in perpetual
dread of making a false move. In their own words,
* There is the demon of eepeated FATLimE casting his
shadow by us as we move on ; ' and they are deter-
mined, once for all, to exorcise this same demon out
of their country's history. The rumours of a Whig
accession, to be followed by a gracious and merciful
liberation of the Liberator, made them quite nervous ;
THAT would be a difficulty, indeed : yet they think
they could get through it. Even the decision on the
writ of error is anticipated, by these impracticable and
hard-headed patriots, with much less of eager excite-
ment than one would suppose. We repeat the expres-
sion of our conviction, that the state of Ireland is for-
midable and menacing, to a degree far beyond what
public opinion in Great Britain has yet realized to
itself."

But though there was a new policy and new
leaders, it was a change of cabinet, not of dynasty,
which had taken place. Business was conducted in
the name and with the sanction of the imprisoned
chief, and his position in the confidence and affection
of his race was carefully maintained.

The Nation, which I continued to edit without
interruption in prison, seconded the new policy

172 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS.

con amore. The high prerogative law of the Queen's
Bench was repudiated or ignored. On the week the
imprisonment commenced the journal was printed
with green ink, to express hope and confidence ; the
articles which had been pronounced seditious were
republished in a litttle volume entitled The Voice
of the Nation^ and the prosecuted verse in a new
and costly edition of The Spirit of the Nation.

"You have imprisoned three newspaper proprietors,"
Richard Sheil exclaimed in Parliament, "and the Irish
Press is as bold and as exciting as it was before.
Eleven thousand copies of the Kation" newspaper
circulate every week through the coimtry, and
administer the strongest provocation to the most en-
thusiastic spirit of nationaUty which the highest elo-
quence in writing can supply."*

Among the sympathisers with O'Connell in prison,
the Whig journals were conspicuous. If a change
of Government took place, they insisted that the
victims of a packed jury and a partizan judge should

* The Nation was then price sixpence, and eleven thousand
of a circulation which will appear small in the age of penny
papers, represented £^$0, which the people paid weekly for the
pleasure of reading it — sometimes more than the Repeal rent.

Davis, who set slight value on what is called fame, used to say
that, if he had his will, the songs of the Nation would be re-
membered in after times, and the authors quite forgotten, or
survive only in a legend attributing them to some O'Neill or
McCarthy, whose existence critics would naturally dispute. But
the age of myths ended when the printing-press was set up.

THE STATESMAN. 1 73

be immediately released. But what some of us
feared most — not without reason as it proved in the
end — was a renewal of confidential relations between
O'Connell and a Liberal Government. It was not
thirty months since he had been their submissive
ally in Parliament, and the chief controller of their
Irish patronage, and a renewal of these relations must
be fatal to the national cause.

The new policy of the Association was not loo
welcome at head-quarters. O'Connell, like both the
Bonapartes, was determined to found a dynasty at
all costs j and his second son, his destined successor,
was already known among his parasites as the " Young
Liberator." That he had none of the essential gifts
of a tribune did not quench his ambition, and he
dreaded the rise of men who would be unlikely to
accept a lay figure as a national leader. To him the
best-informed writers agree in attributing troubles
which now began to appear. It was the practice
of the Association that no resolution should be pro-
posed which had not been previously submitted to
the general committee, but Daniel, the cadet of
the O'Connells, a young man whose share in public
affairs consisted in the task of reading at Conciliation
Hall a weekly bulletin from his father in prison,
proposed, without previous consultation with the
committee, a vote of thanks to the most discreditable

174 SHORT LIFE OF THOMAS DAVIS.

and untrustworthy of the Irish members, for a speech
in which he had assailed, in violent language, the
leaders of the Irish Federalists. Davis was deeply-
moved, less by the dangerous breach of discip-
line than by a deliberate reversal of the policy of
the Association regarding the Federalists taken with
the assent of O'Connell. He wrote to O'Brien who
was in the country at the moment : —

"When you write to Richmond notice the fact that
Mr. O'Connell's son moved a vote of thanks to Mr.
Dillon Browne without the consent of the committee,
and did so because of Mr. Browne's opposition to the
Charities Bill, which in its present form a majority of
the committee approved. "^Miat is worse he did so
after Mr. Browne had made a speech adverse to our
whole policy, attacking the Federalists, calKng on the
people to turn them out, and this because they did
not aid his opposition to a useful measure. I have
made up my mind if such conduct be repeated to with-
draw silently from the Association. . . . There are
higher things than politics, and I never will sacrifice
my self-respect to them."

When sentence on the State prisoners was pro-
nounced, notice, as we have seen, was given of a
writ of error before the House of Lords, and when the
prisoners were nearly three months in Richmond, a
day was fixed for taking into consideration the ques-
tion whether they were legally convicted. This ap-

THE STATESMAN. 175

peal excited but languid interest in Ireland, justice
from such a Court seeming altogether hopeless.

When the writ came to be heard, Lord Lyndhurst
(Lord Chancellor) and his friend Lord Brougham sus-
tained the judgment of the Irish Court, but Lord Cot-
tenham (the Whig Ex-Chancellor), Lord Denman,
and Lord Campbell (Whig Law Lords) reversed it,
with grave censure of the Irish Chief Justice and the
system of jury-packing which he had upheld.

O'Connell's victory over the Government gave the
national cause an immense impetus. It was a great
opportunity, but he was in a condition of mind and
body when opportunities come in vain. Physically
he was in the preliminary stage of a mortal disease,
and morally he had fallen under the influence of his
incapable son, and thought only how best to retreat
from a position which he considered untenable.

At the first meeting Davis produced a pamphlet in
favour of a Federal Union, just published by Mr.
Grey Porter, the High Sherifif of the peculiarly Pro-
testant county of Fermanagh, himself the grandson of
a bishop. Henry Grattan proposed Captain Mockler,
the representative of a noted Orange family, as a
member; and Smith O'Brien announced the adhe-
sion of Hely Hutchinson, brother of the Earl of
Donoughmore. O'Connell's speech, however, was
what men awaited with strained attention, as the

176 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS.

hands of the barometer which announces the coming
weather. It predicted uncertain times. He noticed
in succession various pleas for advancing the
cause, only to reject them ; and reserved his favour
for the preposterous design of appealing to the
English constituencies, to require their members
in the House of Commons (where Irish nationality
was in a minority of about two in the hundred), to im-
peach the Government for misfeasance in the late
State trial, before the supreme tribunal of the House
of Lords, where our cause had not so much as one
solitary representative. It is scarcely necessary to
add that impeachment was a process as obsolete as
trial by combat. He talked in private of letting the
Federalists show their hand, and, after a few feeble
speeches in public, retired to Darrynane to take his
annual holiday. At the same time, O'Brien, who had
been overworked during the three months of the im-
prisonment, went to his country seat, for a short
recess, and John O'Connell reigned at Conciliation

Hall.

Davis urged me also to make holiday after my
temporary imprisonment, and volunteered to
take charge of the Nation during my absence. If
rest be the legitimate requittal of work, he had more
claim to a holiday than any of us, but he would not
hear of beginning it till after my return.

THE STATBSMAH. 1 77

I had accepted an invitation from O'Connell, to
visit him in his mountain home in Kerry ; two of my
frends, John O'Hagan and D. F. McCarthy, accom-
panied me, and there are frequent allusions to this
excursion in Davis's letters at this time. To Pigot he
wrote : —

"O'C. expects you to Darrynane. You will meet
DuflFy, etc., there, and would greatly like it. . , Hudson
is in Wales, and sent me a trumpet call, a quick step,
and an air from it. Also an essay on the language
which, after all, he seems to think is Celtic. Hurrah
for my ancestors, and for yours, and you, and myself,
and, as poor Tone I think says, hurrah generally."*

After tliree weeks spent among the noble scenery
of Waterford, Cork, and Kerry, as we approached
Darrynane, I announced to Davis my intention of re-
turning immediately to town, and setting him free for
an autumn excursion, but he declined the proposal

"Mt deab D. — ^You MUST not come back here till
the middle of October. I cannot leave town, as one of
my brothers is going to be married about the middle
of next month. I will then go to Belfast to meet
Thomas O'Hagan. The Nation is easy to me, and
will grow easier. Send 'Laurence O'Toole' within a
week, or leave it to number six [of the revised * Spirit
of the Nation']. I am proud of my own dear, dear
Mimster, having pleased you so much. I love it almost

* 67 Bagot Street, September 29, 1844.

N

178 SHORT LIFE OF THOMAS DAVIS.

to tears at the thought. I wrote to William Griffin
[brother of Gerald Griffin, author of the ' Collegians '],
he will gladly guide you [in Limerick]. Tell McCarthy
to write words to McCarthy's march in the Citizen.
Give him my respects, and my best regards to John
O'Hagan. E. B. Roche* wants much to meet you and
to get you to Trabolgan.

" Tell O'Connell that the first news Robert Tighe [an
Irish barrister^ had of the liberation was from the
shouting of the Frankfort mob ! What other man
since Napoleon could have produced such an effect?
Present my respects to the O'Connells, and believe me
.18 busy as a swaUow."

O'Connell, in his pleasant home fast by the Atlantic,
was a patriarchal chief. His talk was of rural sports
for the most part, and the duties of a country gentle-
man.f

The object of the northern journey, where Davis
proposed to meet Thomas O'Hagan, was one of grave
import. Mr. O'Hagan had joined the Repeal Asso-
ciation as a Federalist, and many of the more liberal
and enlightened Whigs came to share his belief that
Federation would furnish a solution of the national
difficulty. Sharman Crawford openly declared for it,
and Mr. Ross, the member for Belfast, Colonel Caul-
field, brother of the Earl of Charlemont, Mr. Thomas

* Then M.P. for Cork County, afterwards Lord Fermoy.
t The visit to Darrynane is described in Voting Ireland^
book ill. , chapter 2,

THE STATESMAN. 179

Hutton, formerly member for Dublin city, and a
number of barristers of good standing in their pro-
fession, were in general ageement with him. It was
proposed to hold a private consultation at Belfast, the
cradle of the greatest national movements in the last
century. Hudson and Davis, who were ready to
go all lengths for unmitigated nationalitity, promoted
this conference, and would have accepted Federalism,
and given it a fair trial. There was no pubHc muster-
roll of the party, but a memorandum found among
Davis's manuscripts indicates how widely he believed
the desire for a Federal Union had spread.

"The wealthiest citizens of Dublin, Cork, and Bel-
fast, many of the leading Whig gentry and barristers,
and not a few Conservatives of rank, hold Federalist
opinions. They include Episcopalians, Presbyterians,
Roman Catholics, Repealers and Anti-Repealers."

The theory of the party was that the Union had
been effected by corruption and force, that it had
worked ruinously for Ireland, and that a new inter-
national treaty with juster provisions ought to be
substituted for it

CHAPTER VII.

CONFLICTS WITH O'CONNELL,
1845.

HE best thing that could befall
O'Connell after his imprison-
ment was that the Liberal party-
should take up Federalism. It
would increase prodigiously the chance of a speedy
settlement, whether on his lines or theirs. He strove
to persuade Crawford and others that their proper
course was to join the Association, not as Repealers
but as Federalists, as Mr. O'Hagan and the Bishop
of Killaloe had done ; but they would not listen to
this proposal. Some of them dishked and distrusted
him personally, and they all knew that no one could
induce a tithe of the party to enter Conciliation Hall
on any pretence. But the objection to his scheme lay
deeper; if the proposal was to be listened to in
England, and accepted as an alternative to Repeal,

CONFLICTS WITH O'CONNELL. l8l

was plain that it must not originate with the Repealers.
When it became certain that the Federalists would not
join him, O'Connell was seized with the fatal idea of
joining them, by declaring himself a convert to their
opinions. He had left prison with the determination
of retreating definitely from the position of the Mallow
defiance, and here, imfortunately, he perceived a favour-
able opportunity. He privately urged two Federalists
who were among his personal friends, William Murphy,
a Smithfield salesman of great wealth, and Thomas
O'Hagan, to ascertain the wishes and intentions of
their political associates. They tried doubtless to
comply with his wishes, but without much success.
His impatience overcame him, and, while the Belfast
consultation was in progress he wrote a letter to the
Association announcing this change of opinion. In
the midst of a long political disquisition there was
this pregnant sentence : —

"For my own part," he said, "I will own that
since I have come to contemplate the specific differ-
ences, such as they are, between simple Bepeal and
Federalism, I do at present feel a preference for the
Federative plan, as tending more to the utility of
Ireland and the maintenance of the connection with
England than the proposal of simple Repeal. But I
must either deliberately propose or deliberately adopt
from some other person a plan of Federative Union
before I bind myself to the opinion I now entertain."

1 82 SHORT LIFE OF THOMAS DAVIS-

The Duke of Wellington's conversion to Catholic
Emancipation, Peel's to Free Trade, Disraeli's to
Household Suffrage, or Lord John Russell's to reli-
gious intolerance in 1851, did not take his party by
more complete surprise than this startling declaration.
The time was when it would have been received
without criticism in the press, as it was actually
received in the Association, or with only a subter-
ranean murmur of dissent, but that time was passed.
It was felt instinctively that this sudden surrender
might be fatal to the national cause by killing popular
confidence, and that even as a stroke of poHcy it was
a mistake. If there had not been a national move-
ment strong and triumphant. Federalism would
never have been heard of; if the national move-
ment was transformed into Federalism the existing
party would probably disappear, for Sharraan Crawford
and his friends would never serve under O'Connell.
Davis was at Belfast, Dillon in Mayo, and all the men
with whom I was accustomed to consult gone on their
autumn holiday. The course the Nation would take
was of supreme importance, for if it was silent no
national journal in the island could be counted on to
face the wrath of O'Connell. But Davis was actually
engaged in Federal negotiations at the moment, and
to denounce Federalism in the Nation would be to
put him in a false position. On the other hand, to

CONFLICTS WITH O'CONNBLL. 1 83

acquiesce after the people had been pledged in twenty
monster meetings to unlimited nationality would
shame us before our allies in America and France,
and humiliate us before our opponents in England,
and would infallibly drive the best men out of an
Association which did not know its own mind on the
most momentous question. It was not Federalism
that was objectionable, but putting the livery of the
Federal party on the shoulders of Nationalists.

I solved the difficulty by writing as the leading
article in the Nation a letter to O'Connell in my own
name, and speaking only for myself. I objected to
the change he proposed, contending that it would not
serve Federalism and might ruin Repeal, and insisting
courteously that the Association had no more right to
alter the constitution upon which its members were
recruited than the Irish Parliament had to surrender
its own functions without consulting its constituents.
The letter was reproduced extensively by the news-
papers, and the controversy spread to nearly every
journal in the empire, and finally to those of France
and the United States. It was generally predicted
that the Nation and the party it immediately repre-
sented would be destroyed, but that, though O'Connell
would conquer them, his new profession of faith might
be regarded as the funeral oration of Repeal. Neither
prediction was verified, both the Nation and the

184 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS.

public cause outlived the difficulty. The story has
been told in detail elsewhere,* and we have to do with
it here only as it concerns Thomas Davis.

I wrote to Davis describing the stress of circum-
stances under which I had acted and inviting him
if he agreed with me, to take part in the controversy.
He replied : —

"Monaghan, Thursday morning.
"My deab D. — On reflecting that other events may
have happened since I left, and regarding the policy
of pressing the discussion further at this moment as
doubtful, I have concluded not to write on our rela-
tions to Federalism, and to ask you to weigh the pro-
priety of letting it be for a week. I shall be in town
on the 1st."

During the week's truce of silence which I adopted
on Davis's suggestion, O'Connell's personal enemies
in the press yelled forth that the Young Irelanders
were manifestly conquered in the first skirmish ; were
dumb, and swallowed their leek in silence, and so
forth.

Davis returned to town immediately, and associated
himself with the course taken by the Nation.

"We shall rejoice," he wrote, "at the progress of
the Federalists, because they advocate national prin-
ciples iand local government. Compared with Unionists

See Young Ireland, book iii., chap. 3.

CONFLICTS WITH o'CONNELL- 1 8$

they deserve our warm support; but not an inch
further shall we go; principle and policy alike forbid
it. Let who will taunt and succumb, we will hold our
course. No anti-Irish organ shall stimulate us into a
quarrel with any national party; no popular man or
influence shall carry us into a compromise. Let the
Federalists be an independent and respected party;
the Repealers an unbroken league — our stand is with
the latter."

And on my own behalf I declared, in relation to the
storm of menace with which we were assailed, —

"The legitimate leader of the movement was not
more willing to lead than we to follow ; we proclaimed
strict obedience and disciphne as essential to success,
and we practised them; for where there are many
captains the ship sinks. But at all times, and now
not less than any other time, we stood prepared to
hold our own opinion against him upon a vital question
(such as the present) as freely as against the meanest
man of the party. We do not run all risks with a
hostile Government, in proclaiming day by day weighty
and dangerous truths, to abandon the same right under
any other apprehension."

The Federal cause, Davis assumed, was completely
ruined by this unexpected coup of the leader. To
O'Brien, he- wrote : —

"All chance of a Federal movement is gone at
present, and mainly because of O'Oonnell's public and
private letters; yet I am still doing all in my power
to procure it, for I yiflh to ooyer C/Oonnell's retreat.

1 86 SHORT LIFE OF THOMAS DAVIS.

He is too closely bound up with Ireland for me ever
to feel lees than the deepest concern for Ids welfare
and reputation."*

The Federalists were naturally discouraged and
angry. " O'Connell," said Deasy, " has jumped into
our boat and swamped it." Sharman Crawford was
deeply indignant, and complained privately to O'Brien
that O'Connell had first attempted to wheedle the
Federalists, and then betrayed them.

"He wants," he said, referring to a former trans-
action,— "he wants to take the same undignified
course, humbugging both Repealers and Federalists ;
trying to make the Repealers beUeve they are Federa-
lists and the Federalists that they are Repealers ; and
keeping a joint delusive agitation, knowing right well
that whenever particulars came to be discussed they
would spHt up like a rope of sand."

But he had inflicted a worse injury on himself than
on any one else. The tone of the national press and
of conspicuous Nationalists was so hostile to his new
opinions that he had to renounce them with something
like contempt. While he still lingered in the country,
he began to note painful evidence that his old popu-
larity had received a painful check. At the beginning
of November he wrote privately to the Secretary of
the O'Connell Tribute :—

* Davis to Smith O'Brien.

CONFLICTS WITH 0*CONNELL. 1 87

"Do you know that I have a feeling of despondency
creeping over me on the subject of this year's tribute.
It seems almost to have dropped still-bom from the
Press. In former years, when the announcement
appeared it was immediately followed by crowded ad-
vertisements in the Dublin papers to meet and arrange
the collection. The Cork, Waterford, Limerick, etc.,
newspapers followed, but there is not one spark
aHght."*

Doheny, who encountered him at a public dinner
at Limerick, on his way to town, thought he was ruffled
by the temper of his audience, and he arrived in
Dublin in no pleasant mood.f

He returned to the Association at the end of
November, and broke contemptuously with the allies
he had so recently sought.

"They were bound," he said, "to declare their plan,
and he had conjectured that there was something
advantageous in it, but he did not go any further;
he expressly said he would not bind himself to any
plan. Yet a cry was raised, a shout was sent forth,

♦ O'Connell to P. V. Fitzpatrick, Nov. 2, 1844, Private
Correspondence of Of Connell.

t *' Your name was received with the loudest cheers ;^ to such
a degree indeed as, in my mind, to rouse the great man's wrath.
But although the reception was most flattering, still there is a
strong feeling that the Nation was wrong in intimating that Dan
had abandoned the cause. To be sure most men who entertain
that feeling have not inquired into the justice or the value of the
argument in the Nation : they content themselves with saying
that it is necessary to preserve the inviolability of his character "
(Doheny to Duffy).

1 88 SHORT LIFE OF THOMAS DAVIS.

by men who doubtless thought themselves fitter to be
leaders than he was, and several young gentlemen began
to exclaim against him instead of reading his letter for
explanation. It was not that they read his letter and
made a mistake, but they made the mistake and did
not read the letter. He had expected the assistance
of the Federalists, and opened the door as wide as he
could without letting out Irish liberty. But," he con-
tinued, " let me toll you a secret : — Federalism is not
worth that " — snapping his fingers. " Federalists, I am
told, are still talking and meeting — much good may it
do them ; I wish them all manner of happiness : but
I don't expect any good from it. I saw a little trickery
on the part of their 'aide-de-camp,' but I don't care
for that ; I have a great respect for them. I wish
them well. Let them work as well as they can, but
they are none of my children; I have nothing to do
with them."

The risk of the Association being suddenly trans-
formed was at an end, but his northern allies were
disgusted and alienated, and cynical politicians declared
that the punishment of the Nation was only postponed
to a favourable opportunity.

The press of all parties made itself busy with the
controversy and its abrupt conclusion. Taifs Maga-
zine summed up the situation in terms which repre-
sented adequately the verdict of independent specta-
tors : —

"The Agitator hag ceased to be master of the agita-
tion. The magician is impotent to exorcise — has only

CONFLICTS WITH o'cONNBLL. 1 89

a qualified and conditional power to command — the
spirit that hie spells have evoked. He cannot now do
what he will with his own ; there is a power in the
Repeal Association, behind the chair, and greater than
the chair. Why did Mr. O'Connell take the first oppor-
tunity he could find to snap his fingers at Federalism, so
soon after having deliberately and elaborately avowed
a preference for it? Not merely because Federalists
stood aloof, and did not seem to feel flattered by his
preference, but chiefly because Mr. Duffy wrote a cer-
tain letter in the Nation — a letter, we may say in
passing, which more than confirms the sense we have
long entertained of this gentleman's, and his coadjutors*
talent, sincerity, and mental independence — refusing,
in pretty flat terms, to be marched to or through the
Coventry of Federalism. Mr. O'Connell has since,
not in the best taste or feeling, sneered at 'the young
gentlemen who thought themselves fitter leaders than he
was ; but the young gentlemen carried the day neverthe-
less, against the old gentleman. We see in this, that there
is a limit to the supremacy of this extraordinary man
over the movement which his own graiius originated ;
what he has done he is quite unable to undo ; Repeal
has a life of its own, independent of his influence or
control; his leadership is gladly accepted and sub-
mitted to, but always under condition, that he leads
the right way."

The punishment of the Nation was indeed only
postponed. I have heard an experienced statesman
declare that the hardest penalties he suffered in public
life were penalties for doing some manifest duty, and
the young men were destined to pay for their success

190 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS.

in this unsought contest by a long conflict with
O'Connell, which proved disastrous to them, and in
the end fatal to him.

We have seen what Davis and his comrades were
doing for the Irish cause, and how forbearing was their
judgment of O'Connell. They had won a right to his
absolute confidence, and the generous interpretation
which confidence begets ; but strong men are rarely
magnanimous, and political leaders, like kings, come to
regard independence as incipient treason. There is
now no doubt that the leader determined to break with
the young men, and, if he could not reduce them to
unquestioning submission, to reduce them at any rate
to political impotence. Paragraphs began to appear
in provincial papers charging Davis with anti-Catholic
sentiments. They might as reasonably have charged
him with anti-Irish prejudices. He was a Protestant
with the most generous and considerate indulgence
for the opinions of the bulk of his countrymen. But
it was a point on which the people were naturally
sensitive and ready to take alarm. The first name
which came to light in connection with this detraction
was a singularly unexpected one. Edward Walsh, a
National schoolmaster, contributed some sweet simple
ballads to the Nation^ and having afterwards fallen
under the censure of the Board of Education and got
dismissed, supposed that his connection with the

CONFLICTS WITH o'cONTTELL. 19^

Nation\i2i^ done him a disservice. I accepted this
view of the situation, and obtained other employment
for him from Mr. Coffey, proprietor of the Monitor,
The close work of a newspaper office galled him, and
Davis, who sympathised with the poet harnessed to
unaccustomed work, got him transferred to the staff
of Conciliation Hall, and after a little time procured
for him shorter hours and better pay. These circum-
stances naturally increased our surprise on reading, in
a country paper, a letter from Mr. Walsh, stating that
Davis, during my absence on the excursion to Darry-
nane, had rejected one of his poems on account of
the Catholic sentunents it contained.* Making the
largest allowance for the susceptibility of the poetic
temperament, this imputation was little short of an act
of baseness, for nothing can be more certain than that
such a motive did not operate at all.

In a memoir of Walsh published in the CV//, and
afterwards attributed, I do not know on what authority,
to Charies Kickham, Walsh's unaccountable prejudice
against Davis is noted.

"He (Walsh) was proud of Gavan Duffy's friendship
and often alluded to it in his correspondence. But
the instinct, if we may call it so, by which he allowed
himself to be guided in his likings and his antipathies,
did assuredly mislead him, in one remarkable instance.

♦ The letter appeared in the Wexford Independent.

192 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS.

When we come to mention the name of the man who
was disliked by Edward Walsh, the reader will receive
the announcement with profound astonishment. To
us, at all events, it is utterly incomprehensible. . ,
The man whom Edward Walsh dislike<l was Thomas
Davis!"

An attack of a much graver character came from
another quarter. The Dublin Review^ in noticing
Maddyn's Ireland and its Rulers, pointed out that the
assailant of O'Connell was a man who had once been
a Catholic but had abandoned his creed for a more
prosperous one, and it treated the criticism of such a
person with contempt. The reviewer was a professor
of dogmatic theology, writing in a religious periodical,
and no one will wonder that he insisted on this view of
the transaction. But Davis, who was jealous for his
friend, and still more for religious liberty, censured the
spirit of the reviewer as destructive of Irish union.

"If this be, as it seems, a threat, all we can say is,
it shall be met. The Repeal Association, under O'Con-
nell's advice, censured most severely those in Cork
who hissed a convert to Protestantism. Neither he
nor we nor any of our party will stand tamely by and
see any man threatened or struck by hand or word
for holding or changing his creed. If this were allowed
(we say it in warning), events would ensue that would
indeed change the destinies of Ireland,"

The reviewer, who was a strong passionate, but
perfectly honourable man, turned fiercely on his

CONFLICTS WITH o'cONNELL. 1 93

critic, and, in a letter to the Weekly Register^ * de-
nounced the Nation as teaching anti-Catholicdoctrines.
Several instances were cited which it was perfectly
possible for a teacher of dogmatic theology to consider
dangerous, but which were innocent in design, and if
they appeared in any Irish journal of to-day would not
attract the slightest censure. The reviewer would
have scorned to make any charge which he did not
believe to be substantially true, but he was in a passion,
and he was fighting for his individual will as vehe-
mently as for his convictions.

These events gave a convenient text to Mr. John
O'Connell, and we found after a little time that it was
circulated among the priests south and north, that
there was a dangerous spirit in the Nation^ hostile to
religion. It is needless to give any answer at present
to these accusations. The writers of the Nation have
lived their lives and for the most part died their deaths,
and the question is disposed of on the best evidence.
But it is certain that a serious impression was pro-
duced at the moment, and carefully worked up by the
industry of the " Young Liberator " with at least the
tacit sanction of his father. Davis was seriously moved
by the fear that, after all that had been done and

* The Weekly Register (which had outlived the Morning
Register of which it was an offshoot). He wrote under the
signature of " An Irish Priest."

O

194 SHORT LIFB OP THOMAS DAVIS.

suffered, the national cause might be again ruined by-
bigotry and hypocrisy. He was still in Ulster when
the letters of " An Irish Priest " were published, and
he wrote to me from Belfast : —

"I have written to J. O'Connell, O'Brien, etc., by
this post, to stop the lies of the bigot journals. I have
done so, less even on account of the Nation (which can
be steered out of the difficulty in three weeks without
any concession), than to ascertain whether the CathoHcs
can and will prevent bigots from interfering with re-
ligious Uberty. If they cannot, or will not, I shall
withdraw from politics ; as I am determined not to
be the tool of a Catholic ascendancy, while apparently
the enemy of British domination. . . . The last Nation-
is excellent, and is another proof that, after March
next, you will be able to let me retreat for a year on
my history. I have given up verses since I left Dub-
lin, and feel as if I could not write them again ; so
leave plenty (for publication in the Nation) when you
are going to London. I shall be up by the end of the
week. Hudson and I took a sly trip through
Monaghan, Leitrim, Roscommon, etc. I am tolerably
well in body, and in good spirits."

On the same day he wrote to Smith O'Brien in the
same spirit. O'Brien's reply exhibits the just and con-
siderate ch^^cter of the man. He put himself in the
place of his opponents in the controversy, and sug-
gested how much they might urge in support of their
views : —

"In compliance with your request," he said, "I have
written to D'Connell requesting his intervention to put

CONFLICTS WITH o'CONNELL. 1 95

a stop to the discussions arising amongst the national
party. I have read the letter of 'An Irish Priest.' It
is very clever, very Catholic, and, if unity •vrere not
essential, it would be a fair manifestation of opinion
adverse to those promulgated by the Nation. I need
not say I agree much more with the opinions of the
writer in the Nation than with those of the Irish
Priest ; but, then, you and I should remember that
we are Protestants, and that the bulk of the Irish are
Catholics. I foresee, however, that unless O'Connell
ia able and willing to act as a mediator on the present
occasion, we shall have a Priest and an Anti-Peiest
party among the CathoHcs of Ireland. This I should
much deplore. Unity is essential to our success, and
therefore division at present would be madness ; but
even if Repeal were won, I should deeply regret such
encroachments on the part of the clergy as would
justify organized resistance, or, what is quite as bad,
infidel hostility to all those feelings and opinions upon
which religion rests."

I wrote a specific reply to the Irish Priest in the
journal where his letter had appeared,* and Davis,

* As respects the journal publishing the imputation, I re-
minded the editor that there was not one of us now charged with
anti-Catholic designs who had not frequently written in his own
paper, before the Nation came into existence, and I invited him
to account for the metamorphoses we must have undergone, if
the imputation were well founded, in passing from Elephant
Lane to D'Olier Street. As regards Davis, whose very name
was unknown to the bulk of the National party at that time, I
said, " I am ashamed that any Catholic should make a defence
necessar>' in the case of a Protestant who, I believe in my soul,
has done more for the nationality of Ireland than any man living
but O'Connell — a man whose labours are traceable through all
the counsels and all the publications of the Association, and in a
new and healthy influence on the art and literature of the country."

196 SHORT LIFE OF THOMAS DAVIS-

who maintained friendly relations with the proprietor
since his brief connection with the Register^ remon-
strated with him personally on the injury he was
inflicting on the public cause.

John O'Connell replied to Davis's remonstrances in
vague generalities, with a significant allusion to the
Federal controversy ; but his father joined issue in an
able and trenchant letter, which treated the remon-
strance with scorn, thinly veiled in irony.

" Darrynane, October 30, 1844.

"My deab Davis,

"My son John has given me to read your Pro-
testant philippic from Belfast. I have undertaken to
answer it, because your writing to my son seems to
bespeak a foregone conclusion in your mind, that we
are in some way connected with the attacks upon the
Natiox. Now I most solemnly declare that you are
most entirely mistaken — none of us has the slightest in-
clination to do anything that could in any wise injure
that paper or its estimable proprietor, and certainly
we are not directly or indirectly implicated in the
attacks upon it

"With respect to the 'Italian Censorship,' the
Nation ought to be at the fullest liberty to abuse it ;
and, as regards the ' State Trial Miracle,' the Nation-
should be at liberty to abuse, not only that, but every
other miracle, from the days of the Apostles to the
present.

..." "With respect to the Dublin Bettew, the word
* insolence ' appears to me to be totally inapplicable.
All the Review did (and I have examined it again

CONFLICTS WICfl O'CONNELL. 1 97

deliberately) was to insist that a man who, from being
a Catholic, became a Protestant, was not a faith-
worthy witness in his attacks upon the Catholic clergy.
Now, independent of that man's religion, of which I
care nothing, there never lived a more odious or dis-
gusting public writer, with one single exception, and
that is the passage in which he praises you.

. . . "I hate bigotry of every kind — Catholic, Pro-
testant, or Dissent — but I do not think there is any
room for my interfering by any public declaration at
present. I cannot join in the exaltation of Presbyterian
purity or brightness of faith ; at the same time that
I assert for everybody a perfect right to praise both the
one and the other, liable to be assailed in argument
by those who choose to enter into the controversy at
the other side. But, with respect to the Dublin
Review, I am perfectly convinced the Nation was in
the wrong. However, I take no part either one way
or the other in the subject. As to my using my influence
to prevent this newspaper war, I have no such influ-
ence that I could bring to bear. You really can much
better influence the continuence or termination of this
bye-battle than I can. All I am anxious about is the
property in the Nation ; I am most anxious that it
should be a lucrative and profitable concern. My de-
sire is to promote its prosperity in every way I could.
I am, besides, proud as an Irishman of the talent dis-
played in it, and by no one more than by yourself.
It is really an honour to the country, and if you would
lessen a little of your Protestant zeal, and not be angry
when you 'play at bowls in meeting rubbers,' I should
hope that, this skirmish being at an end, the writers
for the Nation will continue their soul-stirring spirit-
enlivening strains, and will continue to 'pioneer the
way' to genuine liberty, to perfect liberality, and
entire political equality for all religious persuasions.

1 98 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS-

... "I beg of you, my dear Davis, to believe, as
you may do with the fullest confidence, that I am most
sincerely,

"Your attached friend,

"Daniel O'Connell."

Some of the Protestant repealers shared Davis's
apprehension. Hely Hutchinson remonstrated with
Maurice O'Connell on the danger to the cause, and
Burke Roche threatened, a little too boisterously,
perhaps, the measures of defence-he meditated.

"If I hear much more of this damned outlandish
bigotry in Conciliation Hall," he wrote, " I will go over
and give you all a piece of my mind, which will be
more useful than palatable."*

While Davis was thinking only of the public cause,
his associates were thinking of him. He was right,
and grandly and heroically right, and they would
stand by him whoever might be his assailants. He
must not be singled out or isolated ; they were all his
comrades, and it was a common cause. The prevail-
ing sentiment was not alarm but bitter indignation.
It seemed to them manifest perfidy to the cause to
assail the man who had served it with most con-
spicuous genius and a patient assiduity and self-
negation without parallel. O'Connell was receiving a
princely income from the people ; his son was candi-

* Burke Roche to Duffy.

CONFLICTS WITH o'cONNELL. 1 99

date for the succession to the popular tribunate ; but
Davis sought or accepted no reward for his labours,
beyond the scanty income of a journalist, and was un-
willing that his name should be ever heard in pubUc
places or seen in the newspapers.

MacNevin was among the first to give expression to
this feeling. In a letter to a Belfast newspaper he
vindicated his friend.

"Woe," he said, "to the country wherein could be
found a single tongue to slander so pure and earnest a
man; one whose indomitable labour, whose wonderful
information and enthusiasm are devoted, without one
thought of ambition or self, to the ardoua task of rais-
ing up our country."

Davis had friends, MacNevin declared, who would
not suffer him to be sacrificed. They repudiated the
somewhat fantastic name of " Young Ireland " which
had been bestowed upon them, but they admitted
and proclaimed the fact of their friendship and union
They were members for the most part of the profes-
sions, or artists or writers, of competent means and
liberal education ; and a habit of consulting together
and of meeting in social intercourse gave them the
appearance of a party, without any desire or design on
their part. Why were these men suddenly assailed in
national journals ? Were they tainted in morals, dis-
honest in their dealings with the world, or disreput-

200 SHORT LIFE OF THOMAS DAVIS.

able in their conduct? A charge had never been
made against any man supposed to belong to their
obnoxious school of any crime, vice, immorality, or
dishonesty, and they might at least ask that un-
blemished lives and unimpeached honour should raise
the prejudice in their favour of strong religious con-
victions.

"And what was there that was new and fresh in the
agitation in which this party did not participate — nay,
I fear not to say it, which they did not devise and
originate ? Their object was, not to supersede the
wholesome excitement of public meetings — the ancient
and venerable routine of prescriptive agitation, — but to
add to the stimulant of public talking the quiet teach-
ing of the press, the instruction to be derived from
books, the more refined excitement of bold and vigorous
poetry. Their songs are sung in Protestant drawing-
rooms, and their poets have received the unbought
approval of the greatest critics in England — poets, let
me add with pride, in some instances members of the
Catholic priesthood whose teaching we are slanderously
represented to disregard, and whose character and
sacred profession we are, with audacious ifalsehood,
said to despise."

Character, he said in conclusion, was dear to all
honourable men, and, as it was all the reward they
sought, they would not permit it to be filched away in
silence or with impunity.

The systematic design to defame Davis produced

CONFLICTS WITH O'CONNELL. 201

a reaction which first taught the young men their
power. Hitherto they had never aimed at any other
result than to work silently in the national cause.
They were not popular in the sense of being familiar
and favourite names with the people, for to win popu-
larity there must be much self-display and self-assertion,
and most of them shrunk from exhibiting themselves.
Davis's position in the Irish movement was not unlike
Alexander Hamilton's in the American Revolution,
and Dillon was in some points akin to Franklin. How
obscure these founders of the United States were in
their day beside Patrick Henry or Thomas Jefferson,
yet without Franklin and Hamilton the revolution
would have probably been abortive.

Frederick Lucas, who in the present controversy
and in many which succeeded it, sympathised with
Conciliation Hall rather than with them, estimated the
position of the young men fairly and liberally.

"They have been rapidly rising," he said, "into
notice, and into power. They are indeed subordinate
to O'Connell, but they openly avow "that they belong
to another school of doctrine ; they have grown up
imder the shadow of his wings. They have fought
cheerfully and loyally under his banners ; and, so far
as we can judge, they have never exhibited any
symptom of a mean, stupid, or illiberal jealousy of his
extraordinary and overwhelming authority. But,
though they have displayed this free-will docility,

202 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS.

'this proud submission/ 'this dignified obedience/ they
have never concealed the fact that they have marked
out a clear and distinct course for themselves ; that
they are not the mere echoes of Mr. O'Connell's senti-
ments ; that they are not the slaves or the servants
of any man."

While this controversy was still running its course it
was checked by a counter-current. It became known
that the English Government, which had long main-
tained occult relations with the Court of Rome, had
recently sent a gentleman of an old English Catholic
family to the Pope to induce him to forbid Catholic
bishops taking part in the Repeal movement. A letter
had arrived from the Propaganda bearing this character,
and the question how it would be received was
anxiously debated among Protestant Nationalists. The
jealousy of foreign interference, which Irishmen have
always felt and still feel, burst out like a volcano. All
sections of the National party, O'Connell, the Voung
Irelanders, and the National Whigs took a decided
stand against any interference by Rome in our secular
affairs.

Other events ensued which made any open attack
on the young men impossible at the moment. Grey
Porter joined the Association on the specific condition
that its accounts should be audited and published,
which hitherto had never been done. Lord Cloncurry,

CONFLICTS wrrn o connell. 203

who could not be induced to «nter Conciliation Hall,
justified the hopes of the founders of the 'Eighty-two
Club by becoming a member. Neither of them would
have remained a moment if the bigotry privately
fomented made itself heard on the platform. The
Dublin Library, an old popular institution, elected the
principal Young Irelanders* and some of their friends
on its managing committee, and Davis was admitted a
member of the Royal Irish Academy. The work
done and influenced by the young men at the time
made it a dangerous as well as a wicked folly to dis-
parage them.

O'Brien made a point that Davis should take the
chair at Conciliation Hall, and a little later moved a
vote of thanks to him for his valuable reports, con-
stituting the best part of the work done by the Parlia-
mentary Committee.

A still more momentous transaction diverted at-
tention from these personal troubles. At the opening
of the Parliamentary session of 1845, Sir Robert
Peel declared that he desired to make peace with
Ireland before engaging in a contest with America,
which seemed imminent. There was a dangerous
conspiracy in Ireland against the authority of Parlia-

* Davis, MacNevin, John O'Hagan, Richard O'Gorman,
Gavan Duflfy, and their friends Smith O'Brien and Sir Colman
O'Lc^hlen, were among the number.

204 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS.

ment which could not be broken up by force ; but he
was persuaded that it might be broken up by a spirit
of forbearance and generosity. And he was about
to make the experiment forthwith.

His first proposal was to increase the grant to
Maynooth College, and make it a permanent appro-
priation, instead of a vote on the estimates, which
provoked an annual faction fight. The Maynooth
Bill was fiercely resisted in England as *' an endow-
ment of Popery ; " there was a stormy protest in the
House of Commons, and a hurricane of petitions
from the country. In Ireland the NationaHsts
received it thankfully, but the party who were
in tranquil possession of a profusely endowed Church
and a wealthy University opposed it tooth and nail.

Peel's second proposal was to found an adequate
system of middle-class education, which was so pro-
foundly needed in Ireland. Colleges would be estab-
lished in Cork, Belfast, and Galway, liberally endowed
by the State to provide a purely secular education.
To this scheme the bulk of the Liberal Irish members,
led on this question by Thomas Wyse, gave a cordial
welcome. A majority of the Catholic bishops ap-
proved of the general design, objecting to certain ill-
considered details. All the barristers and country
gentlemen in the Association, and the middle-class
generally, supported it. To Davis it was like the

CONFLICTS WITH O'CONNELL. 20$

unhoped-for realization of a dream. To educate the
young men of the middle class and of both races, and
to educate them together that prejudice and bigotry
might be killed in the bud, was one of the projects
nearest to his heart It would strengthen the soul of
Ireland with knowledge, he said, and knit the creeds
in liberal and trusting friendship. He threw all the
vigour of his natiu-e into the task of getting this
measure unanimously and thankfully accepted. The
plan needed amendment in essential points, but those
who designed it would not, it might be safely assumed,
permit it to be spoilt for want of reasonable amend-
ments. The students were to be non-resident, and
there was not adequate security provided for their
good conduct and moral discipline out of class. The
appointment of professors was retained in the hands of
Government — a method which tended to destroy
academic independence. But if these defects were
removed, the colleges would be an inestimable gain.

The first note of dissension came from the marplot
of the National party. Mr. John O'Connell, in the
committee of the Association, denounced the measure
as a plot against the faith and morals of the Irish
people. This criticism would have been treated with
contempt but that his father unexpectedly came to his
assistance. O'Connell during his public life had re-
peatedly advocated the education of our young men in

206 SHORT LIPB OF THOMAS DAVIS.

mixed schools and colleges for the same motives which
influenced Davis, but he now renounced this opinion
as unexpectedly as he had renounced Nationality in
favour of Federalism a few months before, and, echo-
ing the language of a Tory bigot in the House of
Commons, declared the measure to be a huge scheme
of godless education. Davis besought him to keep the
question out of the Association, whose sole object was
to repeal the Union, and where angry debate was sure
to follow on such a collateral question. This truce
O'Connell positively declined, and at the first meeting
in Conciliation Hall he proclaimed his fierce antipathy
to the scheme. Davis immediately followed him,
analysing and vindicating the plan. O'Connell inter-
posed to declare that debate was premature, as they
had not seen the measure. Next day a renewed at-
tempt to keep the question out of the Association was
made. A memorial, signed by forty members of the
general committee, was privately presented to O'Con-
nell supporting this proposal. The remonstrance was
so formidable that he felt compelled to acquiesce. It
was agreed that the question should be mentioned no
more in the Association till the bishops had decided,
but both parties were to be at liberty to push their
opinions outside Conciliation Hall. Davis and all the
writers of the Nation appealed successively to the
people, and O'Connell wrote a series of leading articles

CONFLICTS WITH O'CONNELL. 207

in the Freeman's Journal to refute them. These pro-
ceedings were within the legitimate conditions of the
truce, but Mr. John O'Connell considered himself at
liberty to use the agency of the Association to send to
the country for signature petitions praying for the utter
rejection of the Bill. Among the men of mark in the
movement there was not so much as one who sided
with the O'Connells. But the men of no mark, " the
parasites and pickers up of crumbs," were very busy
stimulating resistance. And John 0*Connell, who had
recently represented the Young Irelanders as indif-
ferent to religion, found here a lucky opportunity of
insisting that his suspicions were well founded. But
his sagacious father began to discover a fact he had
little suspected, that with the Young Irelanders had
grown up a new class of politicians as different from
his ordinary retinue as teetotalers were from sots.

The meeting of the Catholic bishops resulted in
a memorial to the Lord Lieutenant, professing their
"readiness to co-operate with the Government on
fair and reasonable terms, in establishing a system
for the further extension of academical education,"
but not in the proposal as it stood, which they con-
sidered dangerous to faith and morals. The terms
they proposed seem to me to fall within these lines,
being essentially just and reasonable. They asked
that a fair proportion of the professors and other

208 SHORT LIFE OF THOMAS DAVIS.

office-bearers in the colleges should be Catholics,
whose moral conduct had been certified by testimo-
nials from their respective prelates ; that all appoint-
ments to office should be made by a board of trustees,
of which the Catholic bishops of the province where
the college was erected should be members ; that any
officer convicted before the board of attempting to
undermine the faith or injure the morals of any
student should immediately be removed from office
by the board ; that as the students were to be non-
resident, there should be a chaplain appointed to
superintend the moral and religious instruction of
the Catholic students, to be appointed on the recom-
mendation of the bishop of the diocese in which the
college was situated, who should also have the power
of removing him.

There was another concession demanded which
might have been made the subject of a compromise.
The bishops pointed out that Catholic students could
not attend lectures on history, metaphysics, moral
philosophy, geology, or anatomy, as they were taught
by Protestant professors, without imminent danger
to their faith and morals. But history might have
been omitted from the course ; it is best studied in
the closet : and Protestants, it was suggested, would
not object to anatomy or geology being taught by
Catholic professors. But O'Connell was determined

CONFLICTS ymn o*connell. 209

there should be no agreement. He would defeat the
Young Irelanders where they had put forth all their
strength ; and it may be further surmised that he was
determined Peel should not rob his late allies, the
Whigs, of the credit of conciliating Ireland. At the
meeting following the publication of the bishops'
memorial, he declared that they had pronounced the
nefarious scheme dangerous to faith and morals, and
affirmed that it must be rejected utterly. Let there
be separate colleges in separate cities, for Catholics,
Protestants, and Presbyterians, and no education in
common. Mr. John O'Connell followed, exaggerating
the opinions of his father, and denying that the
bishops sanctioned mixed education. Smith O'Brien
declared that he honoured the solicitude of Catholics
for religious education, but he himself thought a
system of adequate precaution might be engrafted on
the Government scheme.

Among Davis's fellow-students in college was a
young man named Michael George Conway. He was
gifted with prompt speech and unblushing effrontery.
But he wanted conduct and integrity, and had
gradually fallen out of men's esteem. He had been
recently blackballed, by the Young Irelanders he
believed, in the 'Eighty-two Club, and he came down
to the Association burning for revenge. He fell on
a chance phrase of Barry's in the debate, misrepre-

p

210 SHORT LtFB OF THOMAS DAV13.

sented it outrageously, and declared that it was
characteristic of his party and his principles — a party
on which the strong hand of O'Connell must be
laid.

"The sentiment triumphant in the meeting that day
was a sentiment common to all Ireland. The Calvinist
or EpiscopaHan of the North, the Unitarian, the Sec-
taries, every man who had any faith in Christianity was
resolved that it should neither be robbed nor thieved
by a faction haK acquainted with the principles they
put forward, and not at all comprehending the Irish
character or the Irish heart. Were his audience pre-
pared to yield up old discord or sympathies to the
theories of Young Ireland? As a Catholic and as an
Irishman, while he was ready to meet his Protestant
friends upon an equal platform, he would resent any
attempt at ascendancy, whether it came from honest
Protestants or honest professing CathoKcs."

During the delivery of this false and intemperate
harangue O'Connell cheered every offensive sentence,
and finally took oflf his cap and waved it over his
head triumphantly. He knew, as all the intelligent
spectators knew, that a man destitute of character
and veracity was libelling men as pure and disinte-
rested as any who had ever served a public cause,
and he took part with the scoundrel. It was one o(
the weaknesses of his public life to prefer agents who
dared not resist his will ; but this open preference of
evil to good was the most unlucky stroke of his

CONFLICTS WITH 0*CONNELL. 211

life. Twelve months later he died, having in the
meantime lost his prodigious popularity and power;
and of all the circumstances which produced that
tragic result, the most operative was probably his con-
duct during this day.

Davis followed Mr. Conway. The feeling upper-
most in his mind was probably suggested by the con-
trast between the life of the man and his new heroic
opinions ; and it will help to put the reader in the same
standpoint if I inform him that the pious Mr. Conway
a few years later professed himself a convert to Pro"
testantism to obtain the wages of a proselytizing
society.

The reader knows in some degree what Thomas
Davis was, what were his life and services, what his re-
lations to his Catholic countrymen were ; that he had
left hereditary friends and kith and kin to act with
O'Connell for Irish ends ; and they may estimate the
effect which the attempt to represent him as a bigot
had upon the generous and upright among his audience.
Dillon ruptured a small blood vessel (as we shall
see later) with restrained wrath; others broke for
ever the tie which had bound them to O'Connell. He
was not worthy, they declared, of the service of men
of honour, who used weapons so vile against a man
of unquestioned honour.

Davis took up the question of the colleges, and

212 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS.

examined it with undisturbed temper and judgment.
'He did not regard himself as a debater, but he
proved on this occasion to be a master of debate.
Cool, resolute, good humoured, he raised and disposed
of point after point with unbroken suavity, in a manner
I have never heard exceeded in legislatures or party-
counsels.

"'I have not,' Davis said on rising, 'more than a
few words to say in reply to the useful, judicious, and
si)irited speech of my old college friend, my Catholic
friend, my very CathoHc friend, Mr. Conway.'

" Mr. O'Connell : ' It is no crime to be a Catholic,
I hope.'

" Mr. Davis : * No, surely no, for — '

"Mr. O'Connell: 'The sneer with which you used
the word would lead to the inference.'

" Mr. Davis : ' No, sir ; no. My best friends, my
nearest friends, my truest friends, are Catholics. I
was brought up in a mixed seminary, where I learned
to know, and, knowing, to love my countrymen, a love
that shall not be disturbed by these casual and unhappy
dissensions. Disunion, alas ! destroyed our country for
centuries. Men of Ireland, shall it destroy it again ? ' "

While he spoke O'Connell, who sat near him, dis-
tracted him by constant observations in an undertone ;
but the young man proceeded with unruffled de-
meanour and calm mastery of his subject. He cordi-
ally approved of the memorial of the Catholic bishops,
which declared for mixed education with certain

CONFLICTS WITH O'CONNELL. 213

necessary precautions. They asked for "a fair pro-
portion " of the professors, meaning beyond dispute,
that the remainder should be Protestants — this was
mixed instruction. They demanded that, in certain
specified branches. Catholic students should be taught
by Catholic professors — this was a just demand, but it
implied a system of mixed education. He like them
objected to the Bill as containing no provision for the
religious discipline of the boys taken away from the
paternal shelter ; and, beyond all, he denounced it
for giving the Government a right to appoint and dis-
miss professors — which was a right to corrupt and in-
timidate.

O'Connell, who had already spoken for tw'o hours,
made a second speech in reply to Davis. His pero-
ration was a memorable one. The venerated hier-
archy, he insisted, had condemned the principle of
the Bill as dangerous to the faith and morals of the
Catholic people.

"But," he said in conclusion, "the principle of the
bill has been supported by Mr. Davis, and was advo-
cated in a newspaper professing to be the organ of the
Roman Catholic people of this country, but which I
emphatically pronounce to be no such thing. The
sections of politicians styling themselves the Young Ire-
land Party, anxious to rule the destinies of this country,
start up and support this measure. There is no such party
as that styled 'Young Ireland.' There may be a few
individuals who take that denomination on themselves.

214 SHORT LIFE OF THOMAS DAVIS.

I am for Old Ireland. 'Tis time that this delusion should
be put an end to. 'Young Ireland' may play what
pranks they please. I do not envy them the name
they rejoice in. I shall stand by Old Ireland ; and I
have some slight notion that Old Ireland will stand by
me."

I have elsewhere described the scene which ensued.*

" When O'Connell sat down consternation was uni-
versal ; he had commenced a war in which either by
success or failure he would bring ruin on the national
cause. Smith O'Brien and Henry Grattan, who were
sitting near him, probably remonstrated, for in a few
minutes he rose again to withdraw the nickname of
'Young Ireland,' as he understood it was disclaimed by
those to whom it was applied. Davis immediately re-
joined that he was glad to get rid of the assumption
that there were factions in the Association. He never
knew any other feeling among his friends, except in
the momentary heat of passion, but that they were
bound to work together for Irish nationahty. They
were bound, among other motives, by a strong affection
towards Daniel O'Connell ; a feeling which he himself
had habitually expressed in his private correspondence
with his dearest and closest friends.

"At this point the strong self-restrained man paused
from emotion, and broke into irrepresible tears. He was
habitually neither emotional nor demonstrative, but he
had been in a state of nervous anxiety for hours ; the
cause for which he had laboured so long and sacrificed
so much was in peril on both hands. The Association
might be broken up by a conflict with O'Connell, or
it might endure a worse fate if it became despicable by

♦ Ybun^ Ireland i book iii., chap 7, " The Provincial Colleges."

CONFLICTS WITH O'CONNELL. 21$

suppressing convictions of public duty at his dictation.
With these fears were mixed the recollection of the
generous forbearance from blame and the promptitude
to praise which marked his own relations to O'Connell,
and the painful contrast with these sentiments presented
by the scene he had just witnessed. He shed tears
from the strong passion of a strong man. The leaders
of the Commons of England, the venerable Coke, John
Pym, and Sir John Eliot, men of iron will, wept when
Charles I. extinguished the hope of an understanding
between the people and the Crown. Tears of wounded
sensibility choked the utterance of Fox when Burke
publicaUy renounced his friendship. Both the public
and the private motives united to assail the sensibility
of Davis.

"O'Connell, whose instincts were generous and cor-
dial, and who was only suspicious from training and
violent by set purpose, immediately interposed with
warm expressions of good will. He had never felt
more gratified than by this evidence of regard. K
Mr. Davis were overcome, it overcame him also ; he
thanked him cordially, and tendered him his hand.
The Association applauded their reconciliation with en-
thusiasm."

Davis's friends were too angry at the injustice he had
suffered to sympathise with his generous emotion,
and some of them remonstrated in private. But he
was determined to make nothing of the incident so
far as it concerned himself. He wrote to Pigot : —

" I send you the Feeeman of to-day, by which you'll
see that O'Connell and I came to a blow-up in the

2l6 SHORT LIFE OF THOMAS DAVIS-

Association, but were reconciled, and fancy ourselves
better friends than ever. I hope so."

''I am delighted to tell you that John Dillon is
better, and Corrigan thinks he can travel to the
country at once. On Monday night he had an alarm-
ing effusion of blood in the lungs, and consumption
was feared. He had been subject to coughs all the
winter used to sit in hot rooms, drink quantities of
coarse tea, and take little exercise. His chest is now
relieved, his voice strong, and his spirits up, but he
must take the greatest care of himself and live healthily.
The excitement of Monday (for he was sitting behind
me when I had the row with O'C.) seems to have
caused the rupture, and as he has got over it, the
alarm may be useful."

He wrote in the same spirit to Denny Lane. Lane's
reply will enable a judicious reader to comprehend the
motive-power of the party — the desire to serve Ireland
at whatever disadvantage, and the total absence of
personal aims. There were considerations, he said,
which must never be lost sight of.

"The first is that O'Connell is the most popular man
that ever lived, and will be implicitly obeyed by a
great body of the people whatever be the orders he
gives them. Next, he is so used to implicit obedience,
and has so often been able to get on after having cast
off those who mutinied against his nod, that he will
think nothing of doing the same again. . . , Next, the
man is so thoroughly Irish and hearty, and so devoted
to the religion to which the people are devoted, that
he is, without exaggeration, loved by them as a
father. Next, the Catholics are bound to him bv their

CONFLICTS WITH O'CONNBLL. 217

gratitude for his achievement of Emancipation, and
nine-tenths of the priests throughout Ireland are his
servants and the people's masters. Well, what does all
this come to? To this, that his power is irresistible,
and that the power of the people of Ireland is ren-
dered ten times more effective than it would otherwise
be, being concentrated in his person, so that, even if
it could, it should not be resisted unless in extremities.
Next, he does not bear control ; you can give him no
more than a hint of differing in opinion from him.
If you have power, and differ from him you cause
a split and do serious mischief. Suppose you have no
power besides your own, if you differ from him
he cuts you off and destroys your usefulness to
the cause. Division has been our bane, and is to
be avoided by every means short of dishonour, or great
or irreparable injury to the cause ; if it becomes abso-
lutely necessary to differ from O'Connell, you must get
O'Brien, who is a sensible man, and will do so only
in an extreme case, to express in the most temperate
manner your dissent. O'Connell would never have
dared to treat him as he treated you. . . , I have more
to say to you, but I am afraid you are tired already.
I will write to you again to-morrow about the display
here. Show this letter to Barry, and also, if you like,
to Duffy."

But Lane did not know, none of us knew, that
O'Connell had by this time made up his mind to let
the national question fall into abeyance, and to
renew his alliance with the Whigs.

Davis was not turned aside a moment from his task.
He prepared a petition asking amendments in the

2l8 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS.

Bill, which was signed by leading citizens of Dublin,
the flower of the Liberal bar, and every man of weight
or character connected with the Repeal Association
outside O'Connell's family. It was determined in the
committee of the Association that the Irish members
should attend Parliament for a short time, and strive
to effect amendments in the Bill. Sir Robert Peel
held out hopes that he would modify the method of
appointing professors, and he promised to add clauses
facilitating the endownment by private benevolence of
divinity lectures and the erection of halls for their
delivery. He was eager to make the measure a
practical success, but he had the bigotry of England
in revolt against him, and O'Connell whom he was
accustomed to regard as the legitimate spokesman of
Irish opinion, showed no disposition to be contented
with any amendments. O'Connell wrote repeatedly
private notes to the Archbishop of Tuam that the
bishops had the game in their hands, and would get
all they wished if they only stood firm.* The result
proved to be very different ; the Bill was read a third
time without serious modification, and two generations
of young Irishmen fighting the battle of life without
adequate discipline, have paid the penalty of mistakes
on both sides which rendered futile a beneficent
design.

* Private Correspondence of (f Conncll, (John Murray, 1888.)

CONPLICTS WITH O CONNBLL- 219

In view of O'Connell's return to Dublin, the project
of breaking with the friends of mixed education was
eagerly debated among the partisans of the " Young
Liberator."

Davis wrote to O'Brien :-—

"O'Loghlen [Sir Colman] and all whom I have con-
sulted are firm against secession. O'Loghlen proposes,
and I agree with him fully, that if O'Connell on his
return should force the question on Conciliation Hall,
an amendment should be moved that the introduction
of such a question, against the wish of a numerous and
respectable portion of the committee, is contrary to
the principles of the Association and likely to injure the
cause of Repeal. A steady elaborate discussion for a
number of days would end in the withdrawal of the
motion and amendment, or in rendering the motion, if
carried, powerless. An explanation would follow, and
— ^the cause would still be safe."

To this opinion O'Brien cordially adhered ; he was
not prepared to sacrifice the greater cause to the
lesser : —

"I feel entirely the importance to the cause of Re-
peal of my maintaining sincere, unreserved, and
friendly co-operation with O'Connell; but I am
bound also to add that, imder the present circum-
stances of our relative positions, I woidd prefer to
withdraw for a time from active efforts in the Associa-
tion, rather than appear there as an adversary to his
policy."*

• O'Brien to Davis, Limerick, December I, 1844.

220 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS.

Davis replied : —

"I will not interfere again till an attempt be made
to pledge the Association to evil resolutions. If the
O'Connells wish, they can ruin the agitation (not the
country) in spite of anyone. Between unaccounted-
for funds, bigotry, bilUngsgate, Tom Steele missions,
crude and contradictory dogmas, and unrelieved stu-
pidity, any cause and any system could be ruined.
America, too, from whence arose 'the cloud in the
west' which alarmed Peel, has been deeply offended,
and but for the Nation there would not now be one
Repeal club in America. Still we have a sincere and
numerous people, a rising literature, an increasing staff
of young, honest, trained men. Peel's splitting pohcy
[a policy which split up the Tories], the chance of war,
the chance of the Orangemen, and a great, though
now misused, organization ; and perhaps next autumn
a rally may be made. It will require forethought,
close union, indifference to personal attack, and firm
measures. At this moment the attempt would utterly
fail ; but parties may be brought down to reason by
the next four months. Again, I tell you, you hare no
notion of the loss sustained by John O'Connell's course.
A dogged temper and a point of honour induce me to
remain in the Association at every sacrifice, and will
keep me there while there is a chance, even a remote
one, of doing good in it."

Here surely was a contest in which men of liberal
instincts outside Ireland could scarcely hesitate in
choosing sides. But so perverse and intractable are
national prejudices that our most bitter assailants
were some of the leaders of liberal opinion in Eng-

CONFLICTS WITH o'cONNELL. 221

land. In an article written by Thackeray, which took
the form of a letter from " Mr. Punch (of Punch) to
Mr. Davis (of the Nation),'^ Davis was turned into
contemptuous ridicule for presuming to maintain his
opinions against O'Connell, and assured that, since
Marat, a more disgusting demagogue had not
appeared than himself!

Davis's friends were determined that he should no
longer shelter himself from the public recognition of
his services. Invitations came to him from the
provinces to various public entertainments ; but he
did not accept any. He was urged to resume the
practise of his profession that he might have a neutral
field wherein to show what sort of a man he was, and
various other projects were mooted in private corre-
spondence. His enemies were equally active ; at that
time and down to the day of his death he was
habitually slandered in private gossip by a herd of
blockheads who thought abuse of him a sure road to
favour with Mr. John O'Connell, who now posed as
victor in the late contest.

When the autumn approached, the leaders of th®
Association scattered for their usual holiday, and this
feeble, barren young man was placed by his father in
supreme control of the great popular organization. It
is still a point in controversy whether the disastrous
use he made of this opportunity was the result of

2 22 SHORT LIFE OF THOMAS DAVIS.

simple incapacity, or of that malicious spirit which the
Americans designate " cussedness." It is certain that
he wished to rehearse the part of dictator, and was not
indisposed to do whatever the Young Irelanders
wished to be left undone. Week after week new
outrages were committed against the fundamental
principles on which the national confederacy rested.
It was open to Irishmen of all political opinions who
desired the repeal of the Union ; but it was suddenly
pledged to a Whig-Radical programme of measures
to be obtained at Westminster. It was bound to cul-
tivate the goodwill of friendly nations ; but the two
most friendly nations in the world, the only two which
took any genuine interest in our affairs, were wantonly
insulted. O'Connell himself declared that he would
not accept Repeal if it were to be obtained with the
assistance of such a people as the French, and on
another occasion he proffered England Irish assistance
in a conflict with the United States, to pluck down the
stripes and stars ! That the Association should be
free from sectarian controversy was a condition of its
existence; but week after week harangues were
delivered on the German Catholic Church, and the
holy coat of Treves, One of the most respectable
men in the movement, an adherent of O'Connell from
the Clare election down to that day, was asked by the
Young Liberator **how he dared" to come to the

CONFLICTS WITH o'cONNBLL- 223

Association to remonstrate against the attacks on
America as unwise and unnecessary. The evil
wrought only concerns us here from the necessity of
explaining allusions in Davis's correspondence, which
might otherwise be unintelligible.

The move towards Whig-Radicalism greatly alarmed
Smith O'Brien, who counted on Tory adhesions. He
wrote to Davis ; —

" Having received lately intimations of support of the
Repeal cause from quarters in which I did not in the least
expect to find it, I am doubly disappointed in finding
that the policy about to be adopted by the leaders of
the Association is such as to destroy all my hopes of
immediate progress."*

Of the attack on America, Dillon wrote to
Davis : —

"Everybody is indignant at O'Connell meddling in
the business. His talk about bringing down the pride of
the American Eagle, if England would pay us suffi-
ciently, is not merely foolish, but false and base. Such
talk must be supremely disgusting to the Americans,
and to every man of honour and spirit."

The effect of the mispolicy was speedy and signal
in America. The Repeal Associations in Baltimore,
New Orleans, and other cities were dissolved, and the

* July 23, 1845.

224 saORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAtlS.

native press was furious against Irish ingratitude. But
the attack on individual liberty outraged Dillon more
than the blunders in public policy.

"I have just read," he wrote to Davis, "with inex-
pressible disgust, the speech of John O'Connell, and
the scene which followed between himself and Scott. It
behoves you to consider very seriously whether the
Nation is not bound to notice this matter. . . . My
notion is that Scott has a right to protection, and that
the public will, or ought to, feel iindignant if this pro-
tection be withheld. The Nation could not possibly
get a better opportunity of reading a long required
lecture to Johnny. The immediate topic is one on
which public opinion is miiversally against him. . . , [Mr,
Scott, who was an old man long associated with O'Con-
nell, and having no relation with the Young Irelanders,
made a slight effort to pacify America by excluding
from Conciliation Hall Negro slavery, Texas, Oregon,
and the whole range of Transatlantic questions upon
which O'Connell and Mr. John O'Connell had been
haranguing.!] Can anything be more evident than the
puerile folly of it? When the Americans were en-
gaged in their own struggle only fancy one of their
orators coming down to the Congress with a violent
invective against the abuses of the French Government
of the day. Any man who is thoroughly in earnest
about one thing cannot allow his mind to wander in
pursuit of things not merely unconnected, but incon-
sistent with that thing. It is impossible latterly to
bear with the insolence of this Httle frog. There is
no man or country safe from his venom. If there be
not some protest against him, he will set the whole
world against us."

CONFLICTS WITH o'cONNELL- 225

Somewhat later he wrote, "" In this county [Mayo],
as far as I can see, Repeal is all but extinct."

But the public blunders of the maladroit tribune did
not exhaust his energies ; he found time to stimulate
the calumnies on Davis and his friends. From Tip-
perary, Doheny wrote to Davis : —

"It [the Nation] is in great disrepute among the
priests. I met a doctor at Nenagh who lost two sub-
scribers to a dispensary for refusing to give it up,
... I was thinking of writing an article on the sub-
ject. If you and Duffy don't approve of it when you
see it, it can be left out. O'Connell's hints are taken
to be corroborative of the ruffianism of others."

MacNevin's impetuous nature could not silently wait
events. He wrote to me at this time : —

"Dillon is sick of the abomination of desolation on
Burgh quay. It never opens its sooty mouth on the
subject of Repeal now. By the way, where is the
Bepeal Agitation? Is it hunting at Derrynane? . . .
My Parliamentary mania is cured ; I would not accept
the representation of any constituency at the beck of
such a body. I will work with you and Davis, but no
more with the base melange of tyranny and mendi-
cancy. I am glad that Davis does not go to the Asso-
ciation; I shall not go when I return."

The most respectable of the recent recruits began to
waver. Grey Porter had retired, and Hely Hutchin-
son declined to enter Parliament, though a southern

Q

2 26 SHORT LIFE OF THOMAS DAVIS-

county was offered to him. This was the condition of
pubhc affairs a few weeks after the question of the
provincial colleges was forced upon the Repeal
Association.

I have not tacked to any transaction in this narra-
tive the moral which it suggests ; the thoughtful reader
prefers to draw his own conclusions. But for once I
ask Irish Protestants to note the conduct of Catholic
young men in a mortal contest. The veteran leader
of the people, sure to be backed by the whole force of
the unreflecting masses, and supported on this occa-
sion by the bulk of the national clergy— a man of
genius, an historic man wielding an authority made
august by a life's services, discredited Thomas Davis,
and was able, few men doubted, to overwhelm him
and his sympathisers in political ruin. A public career
might be closed for all of us ; our journal might be ex-
tinguished ; we were aheady denounced as intriguers
and infidels ; it was quite certain that by-and-by, we
would be described as hirelings of the Castle. But
Davis was right ; and of all his associates, not one man
flinched from his side, — not one man. A crisis
bringing character to a sharper test has never arisen in
our history, nor can ever arise ; and the conduct of
these men, it seems to me, is some guarantee how their
successors would act in any similar emergency.

CHAPTER VIII.

A NEW DEPARTURE. 1 845.

NDER these checks and dis-
couragements Davis did not fall
back, but pressed forward. When
the sky was clear he would
gladly have retired for a time,
but when the wind was high, and the horizon dark, re-
tirement was impossible. To attend Conciliation Hall
was indeed a waste of life, but the special work of the
Nation^ " mind-making," as he named it, remained,
and he threw himself into it with admirable industry.
It is necessary for parties to cast the lead from time to
time, and " take an observation " in order to know
their actual progress ; and the late controversy enabled
us to measure the gain in self-reliance and independent
opinion which the middle-class had attained, and
taught us to set our hopes on a sure but distant future.
It is pathetic, almost tragic, to note the use Davis
made of what proved to be the last months of his life.

228 SflORT LIFE OF THOMAS DAVlS-

Only the work of a Minister of State, controlling a
great department, can equal the variety of interests on
which he had to issue instructions, tender advice, or
call for information. He sat in his little book-lined den
in Bagot Street, or in his bureau at the Nation office,
and moved a hundred minds to furnish the data on
which conclusions are founded, or to carry out sugges-
tions for promoting our main design.

I found among his papers a list of agenda, probably
prepared about this time. Some of the work has been
since done, but whatever remains incomplete has a
valid claim upon the young men of to-day :—

1. Maps of Ireland (historical, and for practical use)
A large map ; and little guide-book plans with sketches
of every ruin.

2. Historical Buildings, Pictures, Busts, Statues, etc.,
in our Towns.

3. Irish Almanacs (Irish letter-paper, with music,
landscapes, emblems, historical designs, etc.)

4. A Musical Circulating Library (established by a
club, and allowing counties to subscribe).

5. Irish Biographical Dictionary.

6. Absentee List [ a roll of the owners of Irish estates
who were non-resident].

7. History of the War from 1641 to 1652.

8. Military History of 1798.

9. Former Commerce with Denmark and Spain.

10. Irish Statistics (each county separately, as in
Scotland).

11. An Illustrated History.

A NEW DEPARTURE. 229

12. Restoration of Churches, etc.

13. Reprint of Historical Pamphlets.

14. Lives of Illustrious Irishmen— Brian Boru, Dathi,
Nial, Columba, Columbkille, Malachi, Duns Scotus,
St. Lawrence, Cathal, Donald O'Brien, McCarthy (with
family notes and antiquarian authorities), Lodge, Cam-
brensis, Lynch, O'Donovan's Annals of the Four Masters,
Hallam, Keating, O'Halloran, O'Flaherty, Byme,
Art O'Kavanagh (see Irish Annals), Kildare, Shane
O'Neil, Hugh O'Donnell, Tirone, Settlement of Ulster,
Roger O'More, Owen Roe and his brothers, etc.,
Ormond, Tirconnell, Sarsfield, Molyneux, Swift, Lucas,
Flood, Grattan, Tone.

The once simple programme of the National party
had become a tangled skein, but he pushed contro-
versy aside, and applied all his strength to the purpose
of training the people for freer lives and higher duties
hereafter.

Maddyn, whom he desired to draw more and more
into this work, pleaded that he had undertaken duties
in connection with Hood's Magazine^ and that he, too,
was in search of recruits : —

"Hood's lamented illness has kept them back, but
it will go on, and no mistake, for Spottiswoode, the
great printer, is the capitalist of the magazine. It will,
I think, merge into a Liberal organ before long, as
the editor of it is biassed that way. Have you any-
thing that you would give them? Turn it over in
your mind. The magazine sells three thousand a
month, and your writings would certainly be seen.

230 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS.

Do jou think Duffy could be got to give some of his
poems for it — even one short paper would be of
value ? "

At this time I submitted to my comrades a project
which next to the establishment of the Nation^ pro-
duced the most permanent results. The project was to
publish a monthly volume of history, poetry, or fiction,
calculated to feed the national spirit or discipline the
national morals; and millions of these books have
since been printed and are in the hands of Irishmen
all over the world. It is not at all wonderful that
writers ignorant of the facts have attributed the design
to Davis, so fertile in design, but it was wholly mine.
He took it up with enthusiasm, but he died before
the third volume was published, and I had not his
invaluable aid in carrying it out. Early in the autumn
Davis wrote to Pigot that the project was launched :—

"Our Library of Ireland promises better than any
other undertaking of our party, and, what is better
still, is likely to be aided by Whigs and Tories.

"The American hurrah for us, and against O'C.'s
speech [on Federalism], was a useful diversion.

"... Johnny has thrown the agitation two years
back. John Dillon doing well. C. G. D, better than
ever in his life. Myself in good health of body and
in a CALM mood — after a storm j you know the pro-
verb."

A NEW DEPARTUKE. 23 1

Shortly after, he wrote to the same correspondent :—

''August 5th, 1845.

"C. G. D.'s ballad volume is at its third edition,
really bona fede, and mil, I am sure, sell 10,000 copies.

"He and every one gone to the country, and I am
alone, anxious for various reasons ; but in work, and
that is a shield from most assaults on the mind."

The success of the library was an infinite pleasure
to Davis, and he reported it exultingly to his friends.
To O'Brien he wrote : -

"What of Sarsfield's statue? I think Moore would
like to do it [Christopher Moore, who had made effec-
tive busts of Curran and Plunket, but proved on trial to
be unequal to statues]. Kirk is not competent. The
' Ballad Poetry ' has reached a third edition, and cannot
be printed fast enough for the sale. It is every way
good. Not an Irish Conservative of education but will
read it, and be brought nearer to Ireland by it. That
is a propagandism worth a thousand harangues such as
jou ask me to make."

O'Brien replied : —

"I cannot but hope that the publication of the
monthly volume will be of infinite value to the national
cause, if the intellectual and moral standard of the
work can be kept as high as it ought to be. I like
the two first numbers very much — I could not lay down
the * Ballads ' until I had read the whole volume. I
am delighted with the article in yesterday's Nation re-
specting the prospect of a union between Orange and
Green. It makes me for a moment believe that the

232 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS.

dream of my life is about to be realized. I know that
I could not recommend [in the Association] that a few
hundred copies of this number of the Nation should
be sent into the Orange districts, without awakening
jealousies which it is very unadvisable to raise ; but I
think it worth while the consideration of you and Duffy,
whether it would not be well to print this article on
separate slips of paper, and send them by post into
the heart of Fermanagh."

To a similar announcement Maddyn replied :

" The * Ballad Poetry of Ireland ' is admirable. It is
all to nothing the best edited collection I ever saw.
The introduction is a choice specimen of writing ; it
merits what the Spectator said of it — ^and what more
could be desired ? It reflects immense credit on Duffy."

The early death of John Banim, the national nove-
list, who shared the political hopes of his race, left his
widow ill provided. As the Executive had the disposal
of an annual grant for literary pensions derived in
part from Irish taxes, it was resolved to claim a provi-
sion for her from that source. A committee was
organized by the writers of the Nation^ and it was
considered at the time a note of progress that the
men who composed it should have consented to act
together for any purpose. They were : — Daniel
O'Connell, M.P., John Anster, LL.D. (the translator
of Faust), Smith O'Brien, M.P., Isaac Butt, LL.D.
(then leader of the extreme Conservatives), Dr. Kane
(since Sir Robert Kane), John O'Connell, M.P.,

A NBW DEPARTURE. 233

Charles Lever (the author of Harry Lorrequer),
Torrens McCullagh, LL.B (since McCullagh Torrens),
Thomas Davis, Samuel Ferguson (the late Sir Samuel
Ferguson, Deputy Keeper of the Records in Ireland),
Thomas O'Hagan (since Lord O'Hagan), William
Carleton (author of Traits and Stories of the Irish
Peasantry), E. B. Roche, M.P. (since Lord
Fermoy), Joseph Le Fanu (author of The House by
the Churchyard^ etc.), Charles Gavan Duffy, Hubert
Smith, M.R.LA., Thomas MacNevin, Dr. Maunsell
(editor of the Evening Mail), Grey Porter (still
assiduous in Irish affairs half a century later), James
M'Glashan (proprietor of the Dublin University
Magazine), and M. J. Barry.

The committee succeeded, through the agency of
A. B. Roche mainly, in inducing Sir Robert Peel to
grant a small pension to Mrs. Banim.*

* The surviving author of the Tedes of the CJETara Family,
who, in politics, was an unswerving adherent of O'Connell,
acknowledged that this service to his brother's widow was attri-
butable to the new men.

" Dear Sir, — I beg to return you my very sincere thanks for the
very effectual performance of your promise to me, in my sister-
in-law's business. However others may have worked in the
matter, I impute it solely to your kindness that such success has
been the result -, and I will always regard you as the person to
whom my brother's widow is really indebted.

" I am, dear sir, your obliged servant,

"M. Banim.
*' Kilkenny, May 10, 1845.
" Chas. Gavan Duffy, Esq."

234 SHORT LIFE OF THOMAS DAVIS.

As the autumn approached, Davis wrote to Maddyn
that he was disturbed by a serious personal trouble.
The trouble was one rarely wanting as a motor in the
lives of young men ; he was in love. When he began
to write verse, one of his friends who thought a Laura
was an essential part of the equipment of a Petrarch,
asked him if he had ever been in love. " I have never
been out of it," was his laughing reply. But these
amourettes were passing fancies, and his profound
nature craved a great and permanent passion. At
length he encountered the girl who was to rule his life.
Annie Hutton was the only daughter of Thomas
Hutton, whom we had already heard of as a leading
Federalist — an opulent and honourable citizen who
had sat in the House of Commons for a time as
member for Dublin, and still took a lively interest in
public affairs. When Davis met her she was barely
twenty years of age, a slender, graceful girl with
features of classic contour and maxble hue. He has
painted her in graphic verse : —

"Her eyes are darker than Dunloe,
Her soul is whiter than the snow,
Her tresses like arbutus flow,

Her step like frighted deer :
Then, still thy waves, capricious lake !
And ceaseless, soft winds, round her wake.
Yet never bring a cloud to break

The smile of Annie dear ! "

A NEW DEPARTURE.

235

The proverbial impediments which bar the course
of true love did not spring in this case from the cold-
ness of the lady. His songs are those of a happy lover.
But at thirty years of age, when the responsibilities of
manhood awaited him, it was too plain that he had
sacrificed professional advancement, and all that is
vulgarly called success, to public duty. He was a
perfect publicist, but in Ireland the national journalist
carried on his work under the constant risk of ruinous
State prosecution. And while his acquaintance with
Miss Hutton was still young there broke out, on the
other hand, as we have seen, a storm of bigotry which
threatened to drive him from public life. If a prudent
father consented to overlook the insecurity of his
worldly position, a generous lover could not shut his
own eyes to it.

It is pleasant to know that no impediment finally
separated the noblest heart beating in Ireland at that
hour from the woman he loved. During the most
stringent labours of the period just past in review, he
became the affianced lover of Miss Hutton. A single
note from the lady will sufficiently indicate the frank
and chivafrous relations established between them.
The love of Davis raises his promised bride far above
the region of conventionality, and makes whatever
concerns her of an interest like that which kindles for
the Beatrice of Dante, the sympathy and solicitude of
a nation.

236 SHORT LIFE OF THOMAS DAVIS.

" How shall I tell you how happy I was to get your
dear, dear letter, for which I love you twenty times
better than before, for now you are treating me with
confidence, not like a child whom it pleases you to
play with. Do you know that was (but it is nearly
gone) the one fear I had, that you would think of me
as a plaything, more than as a friend ; but I don't
think you will since last night. There now, dearest,
you have all that is on my mind. . .. , Oh ! I forgot
I intended to begin this with a profound scolding ; I
am really very angry with you for writing my un-
worthy name in that beautiful book of 'Melodies.' In-
deed, you must not, dearest, be giving me so many
books ; besides, I like better to have them when they
are yours."

Miss Hutton's mother, who was a woman of notable
capacity and accomplishments, one of the gifted circle
whom Miss Mitford called her friends, valued and
esteemed Davis, understood the nobility of his
character and the vigour of his intellect, but was far
from being in sympathy with the main purpose of his
life. This was a trouble he had long encountered in
his own family, among those whom he loved best, and
who loved him best ; and here again it became evident
that difference of conviction would not prevent the
lady from being a gracious and considerate beile-mhe.

During these crowded months, the period of his
hardest work and most exulting happiness, he ripened
notably in health, spirits, and self-confidence. " All
who remember him during that time," says one of his

A KBW DEPABTURB.

«37

friends, "can testify to the wonderful change he
underwent even in appearance. His form dilated i
his eyes got a new fire, his step was firmer, and the
look of a proud purpose sat on him." *

* Mr. Justice O'Hagan.

CHAPTER IX.

DEATH OF THOMAS DAVIS. 1 8 45.

N the midst of this generous and fruitful
work, — on the threshold, as it seemed,
of a long and happy career, — when his
power to stimulate and control his genera-
tion was greatest and most stringently
needed, — from the midst of a crowd of
loyal friends, and from the side of the
woman he had wooed and won for his
bride, Thomas Davis, by God's inscru-
table judgment, received the summons
which none can resist — the strong no
more than the weak. On the 9th of September, 1845,
he did not appear at the Nation office as usual, but
a note came from him announcing what he believed
to be a slight stomachic derangement : —

DEATH OP THOMAS DAVIS. 239

"Tuesday moming.
"Mr DEAB D. — ^I have had an attack of some sort of
cholera, and pebhaps have slight scarlatina. I cannot
see any one, and am in bed. Don't be alarmed about
me; but don't rely on my being able to write.

"Ever yours,— T. D."

The lines were somewhat tremulous, but as I
learned from his servant that the note was written in
bed, the change from his usual clear and vigorous
handwriting excited no suspicion. The brave young
man, tossing in feverish pain, was thinking chiefly of
duties necessarily neglected for a time, and of the
risk that news of his condition in some alarming
shape should reach the heart which it would wound
the sorest. After a couple of days he wrote to me
again : —

" Deab D. — ^I have had a bad attack of scarlatina, with
a horrid sore throat ; don't mention this to ant one
for a very delicate reason I have ; but pray get the Cur-
ran's speeches read, except the Newry election. Have
Conway's Post of 1812 sent back to him, and read and
correct yourself so much of the memoir as I sent In
four days I hope to be able to look at light business
for a short time. — Ever yours — T. D."

The handwriting in this note was still more blurred
and tremulous than in the first, but the tone was so
confident, and the reliance of his comrades on the
vigour of his constitution, which seemed safe against

24© SHORT LIFE OF THOMAS DAVIS.

all the mischances of life, was so complete, that they
banished all apprehension. His mother and sister,
whom he tenderly loved, and who loved him with
passionate affection, were at his bedside. \ Dr. Stokes,
a physician in the first rank of his profession, was in at-
tendance ; and no one doubted that in a week or so
he would be at his post again. I replied to his second
note as one does to a friend absent for a day or two,
by some casual mischance : —

" My deae Davis — ^I will do all you desire forthwith.
When may I hope to see you? Leave word with your
servant when you are well enough to be seen. I can-
not now keep your illness a secret, because I told John
O'Hagan and M'Carthy yesterday; but I will prevent
them going to see you. John says you have an oppor-
tunity of rivalling Mirabeau, by dying at this minute ;
but he begs you won't be tempted by the inviting
opportunity. — Always yours — C. G. D."

Towards the end of the week he improved greatly ;
so greatly that he insisted on driving out for an hour
for a purpose which may be conjectured with con-
siderable confidence. A relapse followed this impru-
dence, but not a whisper of danger was heard. On
Tuesday morning, September 15th, I was summoned
to his mother's house to see his dead body. Never
in a long life has a stroke so wholly unexpected fallen
on me. There lay the man whom I loved beyond any

DEATH OF THOMAS DAVIS. 24I

on the earth, a pallid corpse. His face still wore the
character of sweet silent strength which marked it
when he Uved, and it was hard to believe that I should
never more feel his cordial clasping hand, or see his
eyes beaming with affection and sincerity. He had
grown rapidly worse during the night time, but was
confident of recovery until almost the end, and spoke
impatiently of interrupted work. At dawn he died
in the arms of Neville, a faithful servant, who had
been in constant attendance on him.

I immediately communicated the tragic news to his
closest friends who were absent from Dublin. It was
received with wails of pain and dismay.* Not one

* "Your letter,*' Dillon wrote me, "was like a thrust from
a dagger- I had not even heard that he was unwell. This
calamity makes the world look black. God knows I am tempted
to wish myself well out of it. I am doing you a grievous wrong
to leave you alone at this melancholy time. I was preparing to
be off by the post-car, but my friends have one and all protested
against it, and I verily believe that they would keep me by force
if nothing else would. God help us, my dear fellow ; I don't
know how we can look at one another when we meet."

"I have been," wrote MacNevin, '*in a state of the
greatest agony since I got your letter last evening, I could
have lost nearer than he with less anguish ; — he was such a
noble, gentle creature. And to me always exaggerating my good
qualities, never finding fault, and never, never with an angry
look or word. He was more than a brother ; and I loved him
better than all the brothers I have. Our bond of union is
broken ; what mournful meetings ours will be in future. . . .
My God, how horror-struck will be Dillon and Smith O'Brien !
I never closed my eyes since I got the fatal news."

A lew days later he wrote : ** I feel so lonely and bereaved,
the soul has gone out of all my hopes for the future, and even

R

242 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS.

of them, it may be confidently surmised, had con-
ceived the possibility that the strong man might dis-
appear without a moment's notice, and carry with him
much that was most precious in their lives. I have
already written what I saw and felt on that occasion,

the conviction of the dear friends I have still goes but a short
way to reconcile me to a loss that I know is irreparable. I had
a mournful satisfaction in reading the beautiful tribute in the
Nation to his extraordinary virtues. "

Maddyn wrote in a more subdued tone of Section, which
men of his opinions, for he was a Unionist, may still read with
profit : —

" I need not say how your letter stunned me. I can hardly
credit the intelligence still. With no one in this world did I
more sympathise. I never loved any man so much, and I re-
spected him just as much. The man Thomas Davis ought to be
exhibited in as strong colours as consist with truth, not only to
his countrymen but to the citizens of this empire. The world
must be told what his nature was, how large and patriotic were
his designs, and how truly pure were his purposes. For he was
one of those spirits who quicken others by communication with
them. For the purpose of recording his career in a literary
shape, I venture to suggest that his personal friends should
meet and detennine that his life should be given to the public,
and that all of them should contribute whatever materials they
could to such a work. You ought to be the recorder of his life ;
for that office you of all his friends are the most fitted, not alone by
talents and literary power, but by thoroughly close and catholic
sympathy with the noble Davis in all things. There was more
of the idem velle and idem nolle between him and you than be-
tween any other of that large circle who admired him living and
lament him dead. Your close intimacy and identification for
the last three memorable years, your agreement with him on all
practical and speculative questions of Irish politics, your personal
cognizance of the extent of his unseen labours to serve the
country he loved — these things seem to command that you
honour yourself and your friend by taking charge of his memory.
Let me entreat of you to resolve upon doing so."

DEATH OP THOMAS DAVIS. 243

and I prefer borrowing the narrative to telling the
same tale in other words.

"Though it was the season when Dublin was empti-
est of the cultivated class, a pubUc funeral was imme-
diately determined upon by a few leading men, and
the assent of his family obtained. But it was no cold
funereal pageantry that accompanied him to the grave.
In all the years of my life, before and since, I have
not seen so many grown men weep bitter tears as on
that September day. The members of the 'Eighty-two
Club, the Corporation of Dublin, and the Committee
of the Repeal Association took their place in the pro-
cession as a matter of course ; but it would have
soothed the spirit of Davis to see mixed with the green
uniforms and scarlet gowns, men of culture and intellect
without distinction of party and outside of all political
parties. The antiquaries and scholars of the Royal
Irish Academy, the Councils of the Archseological
and Celtic Societies, the artists of the Royal Hibernian
Academy, the committee of the Dublin Library, sent
deputations, and the names best known in Irish Utera-
ture and art might be read next day in the long list
of mourners. He was buried in Mount Jerome Ceme-
tery, in latter years the burying-place of the Protestant
community, but once the pleasure-grounds of the
suburban villa where John Keogh, the Catholic leader,
took counsel with Wolfe Tone, the young Protestant
patriot, how to unite the jarring creeds in a common
struggle for Ireland. The Whig and Conservative
Press did him generous justice. They recognized in
him a man unbiassed by personal ambition and un-
tainted by the rancour of faction, who loved but
never flattered his countrymen ; and who, still in the
very prime of manhood, was regarded not only with

244 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS.

affection and confidence, but with veneration, by his
associates. The first proposal for a monument came
from a Tory; and Whigs and Tories rivalled his poli-
tical friends in carrying the project to completion.
To the next meeting of the Association, O'Connell
wrote : ' I solemnly declare that I never knew any man
who could be so useful to Ireland in the present stage
of the struggle.' O'Brien on the same occasion de-
scribed him as one who ' united a woman's tenderness
with the soul of a hero.' Even Mr. John O'Connell
discovered, somewhat late in the day, that 'if there
did exist differences of opinion (between Davis and
other Nationalists) they were differences of honest and
sincere conviction.' But the bulk of the people
throughout the island little knew the calamity that had
befallen them. A writer of the period compared them
to children who had lost their father, and were un-
conscious of all the danger and trouble such a fact
implied.

''Judging him now, a generation after his death,
when years and communion with the world have
tempered the exaggerations of youthful friendship,
I can confidently afl&rm that I have not known a man
so nobly gifted as Thomas Davis. If his articles had
been spoken speeches his reputation as an orator would
have rivalled Grattan's, and the beauty and vigour of
his style were never employed for mere show, as they
sometimes were by Grattan ; he fired not rockets, but
salvos of artillery. If his programmes and reports, which
were the plans and specifications of much of the best
work done in his day, had been habitually associated
with his name, liis practical genius would have ranked
as high as O'Connell's. Among his comrades who were
poets he would have been chosen Laureate, though
poetry was only his pastime. And these gifts leave

DEATH OP THOMAS DAVIS. 245

hifl^ rarest qualities untold. "What he was as a friend,
80 tender, so helpful, so steadfast, no description will
paint. His comrades had the same careless confidence
in him men hare in the operations of nature, where
irregularity and aberration do not exist. Like Burke
and Berkeley, he inspired and controlled all who came
within the range of his influence, without aiming to
lead or dominate. He was singularly modest and un-
selfish. In a long Hfe I have never known any man
remotely resemble him in these qualities. The chief
motive-power of a party and a cause, labouring for
them as a man of exemplary industry labours in his
calling, he not only never claimed any recognition or
reward, but discouraged allusion to his services by
those who knew them best.

Passionate enthusiasm is apt to become prejudice,
but in Davis it was controlled not only by a disci-
plined judgment but by a fixed determination to be
just. He brought to political controversy a fair-
ness previously unexampled in Ireland. In all his
writings there will not be found a single sentence re-
flecting ungenerously on any himian being. He had
set himself the task of building up a nation, a task
not beyond his strength had fortune been kind. Now
that the transactions of that day have fallen into their
natural perspective, now that we know what has
perished and what survives of its conflicting opinions,
we may plainly see, that, imperfectly as they knew
him, the Irish race— the grown men of 1845 — in the
highest diapason of their passions, in the widest range
of their capacity for action or endurance, were repre-
sented and embodied in Thomas Davis better than in
any man then living. He had predicted a revolution;
and if fundamental change in the ideas which move
and control a people be a revolution, then his predic-

246 SHORT LITE OP THOMAS DAVI3.

tion was already accomplished. In conflicts of opinion
near at hand a prodigious change made itself manifest,
traceable to teaching of which he was the chief ex-
ponent. During his brief career, scarcely exceeding
three years, he had administered no office of authority,
mounted no tribune, published no books, or next to
none, and marshalled no following ; but with the
simplest agencies, in the columns of a newspaper, in
casual commimication with his friends and contempo-
raries, he made a name which, after a generation, is
still recalled with enthusiasm or tears, and will be
dear to students and patriots while there is an Irish
people."*

From the death-bed of my friend, I passed at a stride
to the death-bed of my young wife, and was for a mo-
ment unfit for work. But my absence proved a gain.
The article in the Nation announcing Davis's death
and burial, which attracted much attention at the time,
was written by one who did not share his opinions or
mine, but who honoured Davis's great gifts, and was
never more at home than when coming to the aid
of a friend in a critical emergency. The late Lord
O'Hagan, then a young barrister, every moment of
whose time was bespoken for professional business,
did me this essential service.

Davis's friends determined to make him known to the
world for what he truly was. A committee of leading
men of the metropolis, without distinction of party,

* Young Ireland, book iii., chap. x.

DEATH OP THOMAS DAVIS. 247

commissioned John Hogan to carve his statue in white
marble. Mr. Burton,* who knew and loved him,
without sharing his political opinions, painted his
portrait. I wrote a brief memoir of him in the Nation,
A selection was made from his. historical and anti-
quarian essays, and his poems were collected and care-
fully edited.! Elegies were written on his memory by
his most distinguished contemporaries. A verse from
Ferguson's elegy will adequately represent them all :—

"I walked through Ballindeny in the springtime,

When the bud was on the tree;
And I said, in every fresh-ploughed field beholding

The sowers striding free,
Scattering broadcast forth the com in golden plenty,

On the quick seed-clasping soil,
Even such, this day, among the fresh-stirred hearts of
Erin,

Thomas Davis, is thy toil."

* The present Sir Frederic Burton.

t The poems were edited by Thomas Wallis, the essays
by Gavan DuflFy. Shortly after his death Ferguson estimated
his labours in the Dublin University Magazine, the mouthpiece
of the Conservative majority, more generously than would have
been possible while he was still an active combatant in current
politics. "They (the Young Irelanders) sought," he says, ** to
teach the people justice, manliness, and reliance on themselves ;
to supplant vanity on the one hand, and servility on the other,
by a just self-appreciation and proper pride ; to make them
sensible that nothing could be had without labour, and nothing
enjoyed without prudence ; to teach them to scorn the baseness
of foul play, and that if they were to fight, they should fight like
men and soldiers — these were the lessons which he now
appeared a chosen instrument for imparting; and in fulfilling
this mission; while Providence left him with us, he did toil with
faithful and unremitting energy."

248 SHORT LIFE OP THOMAS DAVIS.

It is the sure fate of a feeble fire to go out and
be forgotten; but Davis's reputation has gone on
gathering increased light and heat for nearly
half a century. Men and women who were not born
when he was amongst us, rival his personal friends in
devotion. A young Celtic poetess who only became
acquainted with his writings after his death, exclaimed,
" Might not one such Protestant make us forget the
Penal Laws ? " A young Protestant patriot of Saxon
pedigree, who shares many of Davis's gifts as well as
his opinions, made a new and more exhaustive collec-
tion of his essays for English readers fifty years after
the Dublin edition. Welsh publicists and pohticians
are proud to claim him as a scion of their race, whose
aims they applaud and whose character they honour.
Moore left behind him youthful erotics, for which
in his old age he not only blushed but wept. It
needs a large charity towards the sins of genius to
pardon the loose life and vagrant muse of Burns. The
noble, personal independence of B Granger, who would
not accept fee or favour fi-om any party, who refused
to be presented to the Citizen King, to sit in the
Republican Assembly, or to touch the gifts of the
Bonapartes, cannot make us forget that his chansons
graveleuses have, perhaps, corrupted the morals of
France as decisively as his patriotic songs fortified its
public spirit. But there is not one impure thought in
the poetry or prose of Davis.

DEATH OF THOMAS DAVIS. 249

The grevious blow which so suddenly destroyed
Miss Hutton's happiness shortened her life. **She
faded away," says a friend who knew her well, "from
the hour of his death." One task alone interested
her : he had asked her to translate from the Italian,
The Embassy in Ireland of Monsignor Rinuccini^
which lights up a period of profound historical interest
But the task was beyond her strength, and the book
was only completed and published by her mother
twenty years after her death. She died on the 7th of
June, 1853, in the twenty-eighth year of her age, and
will live long in the memory of those who love and
honour Thomas Davis.

In one of her latest letters she raises a question which
none of us can evade — the question: What would
have befallen if Davis had not died ? Our history is
full of problems like this. If Swift had accepted the
Captain's commission which William III. offered him ?
If Phelira O'Neill had been captured with Lord
Maguire? If Tone had been permitted to colonize
his island in the Pacific ? If Hoche had landed in
Munster? If a mitigation of the penal laws had not
opened the Bar to O'Connell, but left him a discon-
tented squireen in Munster ? Any one of these casual
circumstances might have turned backward the current
of our history. If Davis had not died, he would
probably have been driven out of the Repeal Associa-

250 SHORT LIFE OF THOMAS DAVIS.

tion, with Smith O'Brien, when the new Whig com-
pact was completed in 1847, and he would have
brought to Tipperary in '48 the foresight, will, and
resources of a born soldier. He would not have
succeeded, for the time for success was past, but he
would have failed gloriously. As it is, has he not
succeeded gloriously? His spirit has palpably ani-
mated whatever generous work was undertaken for
Ireland from the day of his death to this hour. His
comrades, while they survived, carried the opinions
which they shared with him into literature and public
life, into confederacies and parliaments, into prison
and exile, and never failed to take up the Irish ques-
tion again and again while life remained. A new
generation, scattered over three continents, has found
inspiration in his writings, even when they have some-
times wandered aside from the broad and noble high-
way which he traced out for Irish liberty. It is easy
now to see that the work for which he was fittest was
to be a teacher, and he is still one of the most per-
suasive and beloved teachers of his race ; but beyond
the pregnant thoughts he uttered, and the noble strains
he sang, the life he led was the greatest lesson he has
bequeathed to them.

THE STORY OF
EARLY GAELIC LITERATURE.

BY

DOUGLAS HYDE, LL.D.

NEW LIBRARY OF IRELAND, Vol. VI.

NOTICES OF THE PRESS.

"The story of 'Early Gaelic Literature' is the title
of the latest work added to the rapidly growing series
of the New Irish Library. The author is Dr. Douglas
Hyde, and the book, though issued in an unpretentious
form by Mr. T. Fisher Unwin is of the rarest interest
to every student of Irish literature. . . . Books like
that of Dr. Hyde are lights in the van of advancement."
— Ibish Times, March 8th, 1895. Leading article on
the book.

"Dr. Hyde has the ideal scholarly qualities, the
patience, the enthusiasm, the research, the love of his
work, and he has in addition the power of placing be-
fore us the knowledge he has collected with a Kterary
skill and charm that lift his work out of the category
of the specialist. . . . We hope this addition to the
New Irish Library will sell by tens of thousands in
Ireland. It is informed with more knowledge, sympathy,
and power of imparting knowledge that many rich tomes

OPINIONS OF THE PRESS-

on the shelves of wealthy collectors and in college libraries.
A rich shilling's-worth ! It makes us thirsty for more
yet to come from this fountain-head." — ^Daily Indepen-
dent. Leading article on the book, March 15th, 1895.

"One could not have a pleasanter or a more ac-
complished guide to the beauties of the treasure-house
of Irish poetry and romance. His translations, while
preserving as much as possible of the colour, style, and
even accent of the original, are excellently done, and
are in themselves good literature.'^ — Feeeman's Joub-
NAL, March 17th, 1895.

" Those who read the Story of Early Gaelie Litera-
ture should not omit to read its preface, for it is
one of the most remarkable parts of a remarkable
book. . . , The Story of Early Gaelic Literature is a
book of which every Irishman, no matter what his creed
may be, should feel proud. It is a noble work on a
noble theme, and it is to be hoped its gifted author will
produce many more like it." — Daily Expeess, March
21st, 1895.

"To the true Celtic Irishman it will be as wine to
warm his blood, one of the noblest vindications ever
penned of the learning, the genius, and the civilization
of the far-scattered, but indestructable race of the Clan-
na-Gael." — United Ieeland, March 30th, 1895.

"In the Story of Early Gaelic Literature is given to
the public a book which we trust no Irishman pretend-
ing to interest in national matters will neglect to read.
. . . Dr. Hyde set before himself what to him is a
pleasant task, and he has fulfilled it in a manner beyond
all praise." — Evening Telegraph, March 9th, 1895.

Preparing for hnmediate Publication

A FINAL EDITION

OF

YOUNG IRELAND.

A FRAGMENT OF IRISH HISTORY 1842-1846.

Illustrated with Portraits, Autographs,
Facsimilies and Historical Scenes.

BY THE

Hon. Sir C. GAVAN DUFFY, K.C.M.G.

To be published in two parts, 2s. each, largely illus-
trated, and in a volume handsomely boimd, price Ss.

OPINIONS OF THE CRITICAL PRESS.

From the Satubdat Review.

" The party which Davis created, and of which Duffy
took the leadership from his hand, had many engaging
characteristics, and these characteristics had never been
so eflFectively set out before. The author abstained to
a great extent from that curse of Irish controversy —
indiscriminate and personal abuse of those who differed
with him. The reception of Young Ieeland was thus
favourable even with those who could least admit its

OPINIONS OP THE PRESS.

author's political postulates, or arrive at his historical
standpoint. It was recognized as a valuable contribution
to history where the author spoke with personal know-
ledge, and an interesting contribution to literature even
where he did not."

From The Times.
"The gifted and ill-fated Party of Young Ireland
certainly deserved an Apologia, and it is past dispute
that no one could be more competent for the task than
Sir Charles Gavan Duffy. Notwithstanding the genuine
modesty with which he always attributes the origin of
the school (for, in the true sense, it was a school rather
than a party) to Thomas Davis, he will, we think,
be always regarded as its true founder. He established
and guided from 1842 to 1855 the Nation, which
was in those days its one accepted organ. A State
prisoner with O'Connell in 1844, with Smith O'Brien in
1848, three times tried, and all but convicted of treason
in 1848, he organized, after his release from prison, a
peaceful agitation for the measures which afterwards
formed the main achievements of Mr. Gladstone's Irish
policy. Proceeding to Australia in 1855, he has been
some time Prime Minister of Victoria and Speaker, and
while he filled the chair it is said order reigned in that
tumultuous Parliament."

From The Edinbtjegh Review.

" These, it seems, were the founders, heroes, and
martyrs of the Nation, and we are free to confess that
the Young Ireland of those days had incomparably more
patriotism, eloquence, and energy than their degenerate
successors. But even Ireland cannot produce an inex-
haustible supply of Davises and Duffys. It is in the
nature of all human things : —

'In pejus ruere et retro sublapsa referri.' "

OPINIONS OP THE PRESS.

From The Dublin Review.
"The remarkable and romantic career of the author
serves to stimulate the curiosity of the public ; but, inde-
pendently of those advantages, this book contains literary
merit of too high an order, and historical matter of too
great value, to allow of its being, under any circum-
stances, ignored or forgotten. . . , In the vivid descrip-
tion of persons he greatly excels ; a few graphic touches
and the man stands before us like a picture."

From The Nineteenth Centuet.
"No doubt the Young Ireland movement contributed
greatly, as Sir Charles Duffy contends, to purify and
ennoble the national agitation. It substituted for the
crafty and often vacillating plans of O'Connell's later
years, an open, direct, and generous national policy.
As a revolutionary movement it was a failure. It had
not got to the heart of the peasantry. The influence it has
since had upon the Irish people has sunk graduaUy with
time into their minds and their feelings. In that way
it is more powerful to-day than it was in its own
time." — Justin McCarthy, M.P.

From The Contempoeaby Bevtbw.

" I cannot dismiss the volume without bearing witness
to his scrupulously fair treatment of those — some of
them no longer able to defend themselves — with whom
he came into conflict. He is eminently fair to O'Connell,
and finds excuses for him even when he is obliged to
condemn him." — ^Rev Canon MacCall.

From The Tablet.

"But the public mind of England, of Europe, of
America, and of Australia will listen with interest to the

OPINIONS OP THE PRESS.

solemn utterances of such a man as Sir Charles Gavan
Duffj. A strong advocate for constitutional Goverment,
abhorring anarchy, his whole public life, for the last forty
years, is the best pledge of the soundness and sincerity of
his matured opinions. The dream of his young manhood
was to follow in the footsteps of Roger O'More and the
Confederate Catholics of 1641, and identify the faith
with the nationality of Ireland. Associated with Davis,
Dillon, and others, he founded the Nation, October,
1842, and, faithful to his aim of 'Nationality,' he ex-
panded the controversy from merely Catholic to
common Irish interests. His public Hfe in Ireland, in
the Press, in the Repeal movement, in prison, with
O'Connell in 1844, in founding the Irish Confederation ;
in the abortive attempt at a rising in 1848 ; in the
State prosecutions against him that year ; in the Tenant
League ; and in Parhament from 1852 to 1856, is
familiar to the world. And his colonial career in
Victoria, from his settlement there in 1856, is perhaps
the most brilHant which ever fell to the lot of an
Irish exile."

From The Freeman's JorsNAL (Dublin).

" Apologia pro Socns Meis : So Sir Gavan Duffy
might have fitly named this book. Suppressing himself
BO far as it was at all possible in narrating a history
of which he was so great a part, he has devoted un-
wearied labour and a literary power which has few rivals
to the task of raising an enduring memorial to his old
associates, friends, and fellow- workmen ; and he has
done this with an enthusiasm and freshness of zealous
conviction which fill every reader of his work with won-
der. How vivid it all is ! Five-and-twenty years ago
Mr. Duffy left Ireland, struck down, not only by the

OPINIONS OF THE PRESS-

catastrophe of 1848, but by a second discomfiture — the
faUure of his efforts, in company with Frederick Lucas
and George Henry Moore, in the cause of the Irish
tenant. In the Australian land, to which, in sad dis-
couragement he bent his way, he found the career
denied to him at home. Fortune, distinction, eminence
awaited him. In that land sons and daughters grew
around him. A son of his but the other day held a
high position in the late ministry at Melbourne. It
might have been well deemed that he had transplanted
his whole self, his hopes, aspirations, and affections to
that new world. But no ; all this career of honour and
success seems but a pallid phantom in comparison
with the memory of the days in which to him and his
fellows the day-dawn of a liberated Ireland seemed near
its breaking."

From The Dublin Evening Mail.

Duffy, Davis, and Dillon, whatever opinions we may
be inclined to take as to the precise benefit which each
or any of them conferred upon his country, will long
be remembered in Ireland, as sincere, high-minded, and
lofty-spirited gentlemen. . , . We are unable now, as
Sir Gavan Duffy shows the Mail was unable forty years
ago, to express our approval of the schemes put forward
by the Young Ireland party ; but on that account we
cannot deny to the * dauntless three ' who broached that
movement their legitimate place in the history of the
men who, for one cause or another, Ireland has a right
to be proud of."

From The Ikishman.
"The utility of such a work is not measured by a

OPINIONS OF THE PRESS.

day or period ; it will remain as a sort of political
evangel for the guidance of generations, raising up the
hearts and standards of the people, chastening the
aspirations of a race, and transforming them into the
noble instincts of a nation. It is a large and liberal
donation to the country — this volume in which the
mind is directed, by no swerving hand, along the high
paths of patriotism, and enriched by the rare experience
of honourable and successful statesmanship. . . . Each
of them has, it is true, received his meed of appreciative
praise, in Duffy's historical volumes — good measure,
weU pressed, and brimming over, with the one exception
of the author himself. This should be remembered to
him whose brain originated an Irish literature, whose
reputation has been appreciated by men of honour who
have suffered, like John O'Leary, and whose life history
was summed up in the words of Charles Kickham :
'Duffy is the father of us all.'"

From The Belfast Nobthebn Whig.

"There is no class of Irishmen who will not find
much to interest them in the fascinating description and
judicious criticisms of this book. The editor is dealing
with the dead, and deals tenderly with their memory.
... A marvellously interesting, and almost sensational
story. It must be conceded that he has been remark-
ably fair and temperate in his criticism of men and
events."

From The Coek Examineb.

" This is by far the most valuable contribution to Irish
history that we have had for a generation. It tells the
story of a memorable epoch with a thorough knowledge

OPINIONS OF THB PRESS-

of a man who bore in that epoch a great part^ with the
fairness of a generous nature dealing with friends and
foes whose bones are dust, and with the grace, the
brilliancy, and the lucid order of a master of literary
style. . . . The writer's portraitures of two of the
tlu'ee greatest of the * dramatis peisonse ' — O'Connell
and Davis — are of high historical value. Of the third
scarcely anything is said ; and yet, of * Toung Ireland '
he was the foimder, the sagacious organiser, the brilliant
chief — Charles Gavan Duffy liimself. We cannot re-
member any narration of a series of events in which
the narrator was also a chief actor so free of egotism
as this. But of the other notabilities of the movement
the book is rich with graphic traits."

From The Cork Hebaxd.

" It has been said that men of genius never grow
old, and the latest work of Sir C. Duffy is worthy of
his prime — full, clear, and resonant with the unmis-
takable 'note of genius.' . . , The men themselves
formed a rare combination. Davis, a Protestant of the
South, the son of an officer of Artillery, was brought up
amongst a family allied with the Established Church,
and of strictly Conservative principles. Duffy was a
Catholic from the North, and Dillon a Catholic from
the West, who had pursued for some time ecclesiastical
studies at Maynooth, and always retained the deep con-
victions, the seriousness of thought, and that charity of
feeling and of manner, that would have made him an
ornament to any priesthood. Here were elements com-
bined that never before worked together for Ireland,
and it was with this triad of intellects that Young Ire-
land arose, as the old Christianity of Ireland began
with the three-fold leaf that has become our national

OPINIONS OF THE PRESS-

emblem. . , . Wherever the Irish race has gone and its
seed has been scattered broadcast over the earth, there,
too, have Irish traditions gone, that were garnered hy
the Nation ; there, too, the air vibrates with poetry
that first crystallized into song in the pages of a journal
that made a great reputation almost in a day, and
worthily held it as long as it was worth the holding."

From The Mail, Sydney, New South Wales-

"The political work done was great, but the literary
was even greater. The idea of this part of these young
giants' labours was the creation of a great national
literature, the revival of the lost glories, literary, reli-
gious, and historical, of old Ireland, and generally, in
the language of their chief, 'the education of a people
long depressed by poverty, or injustice, in fair play,
public spirit and manliness." It was a noble idea as
nobly attempted ; and as the leader, almost creator, of
these splendid young spirits now sadly admits, far their
wisest work and their best."

From The Newcastle Daily Cheonicle.

"He appropriately closes with the death of Davis.

There are few things in the English language more
delicately discriminative or more replete with tenderness
than this prose elegy, which recalls all the freshness and
power of Carlyle's tribute to Edward Irving. Time,
which changes so much, has left Sir Charles Gavan
Duffy's literary power untouched. Neither hand nor
brain has forgot its cunning."

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