under great provocations, he was tolerant; as an agitator, moderate in his programme; as a man, generous, high-spirited, and, after a convivial youth, notably temperate. Manifestly it is a character that lends itself to the old-style biography of balance. The easiest estimate of it is to say outright that O'Connell was pure demagogue; but if so, he was one of the greatest. He lived in a time when the conduct of political discussion knew no amenities. It was the day of slander, innuendo, high words for high words, and then-the duel. For the high words, see O'Connell's reported speeches almost anywhere; as for the duelling, he had killed his man at the outset of his prominence, and lived a life of repentance for it. No man, it appears as we read the diatribes of the day, has been more soundly abused in English his replies seem almost to strain the language of abuse. Thus it is that to the modern taste his style so often strikes a false note, and seems a crude mixture of passion and prejudice unworthy of a fame so great.

Therefore O'Connell can least of all men be judged merely by his own words: the critic has always to remember the place and the moment, -the crowded, sympathetic court-room, the biased judge and hostile jury; or the myriad, upturned faces on a green hillside, mobile to each turning of the rhetorical screw. hours O'Connell must have yielded to his own art; the orator was subordinated to oratory, and often said ridiculous things.

At such

It was all of a character with O'Connell's temperamental intensity. In the usual sense of the word, then, he cannot be called a demagogue a mere puppet of the popular will. When the people and O'Connell had two minds about a question, it was not the "Liberator" who changed. Thus, for his opposition to Trades Unions, he was mobbed and hooted in the very streets of Dublin. Nor did he take the demonstration seriously; he knew his people too well for that. In a word, his appeal and influence were racial rather than parochial; he must be counted not as a great

politician, or even statesman, but as one of the "shepherds of the people,"—in Mr. Gladstone's phrase, an ethnagogue.

His genius found its play in a complete and overwhelming attack of any project: the maxim, μŋdev ayav, was never its game. As a young man, he forged early to the front of his profession; as he gained freely, so he was always in debt; and when, as one of the leading advocates of Ireland, the ambition of O'Connell looked farther and saw, as one must fancy, a higher art in agitation, he abandoned the certain prosperities of a legal career and left at his death barely £1000. He was a man of emotions, then, subject to moods and aberrations; best at ex tempore effort; poorly readsingular to state-even in Irish history; and if a great orator, surely an orator with something of the actor there. His name will be cherished among his people as one in whom their wrongs found an eloquent and imperative voice; the world will be disposed to regard him as a fine example of the partly ineffectual, partly

admirable type Reformer, whose particular programme, as yet but half realized, was, in Mr. Lecky's words,* "to open in Ireland a new era, with a separate and independent Parliament and perfect religious equality."

*"Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland," N. Y., 1872, p.

226.

DANIEL O'CONNELL.

IN DEFENCE OF JOHN MAGEE COURT OF KING'S BENCH, DUBLIN, JULY 27, 1813.

The speeches delivered at Dublin in the summer of 1813 by O'Connell as counsel for John Magee, then on trial for libel, have received the exequatur of Mr. Lecky, who considers them as the "Liberator's" greatest efforts at the Bar. Magee was the proprietor of the Evening Post newspaper, in which, on the occasion of the Duke of Richmond's departure from Ireland, there had appeared comments on his conduct as Lord-Lieutenant in which the Government, probably with some eagerness, had discovered a libellous tendency. For the Evening Post was notably pro-Catholic; what was more, its circulation and influence were large; and the Government from its own standpoint had good reasons either to repress the sheet or to change its political complexion. Hence the somewhat tenuous charge of libel laid against Magee.

The specimen here presented of O'Connell's eloquence was, after the trial, piously published by Magee, and later included in that badly printed volume, "Select Speeches of O'Connell," edited by his son, and published by J. Duffy, Dublin, 1865. With some difficulty a probable text has been constructed out of the impressions of worn types and obvious misprints then given to the world.

The speech itself will be found to be characteristic of O'Connell. The bitter fountains of invective, the sava