be a man superfluously rich, and therefore not to be bribed with money, but amenable to the smile of the masters on whom he fawns and to whom he is partial by his prejudice. Such a man, inflated by flattery and bloated in his dignity, may hereafter use his character for sanctity which has served to promote him, as a sword to hew down the struggling liberties of his country." And he told the jury not to stand dictation from this man.

Saurin who, above all others, richly deserved it, he excoriated, lashing him till almost he yelped, and to his face branding him an infamous and profligate liar.

A vivid picture of Saurin, under his castigation, was drawn by Dennis Scully, in an introduction which he wrote for O'Connell's speech, published immediately after by The Post, and distributed in tens of thousands: "How did you feel when Mr. O'Connell branded you as a libeler before the court, a calumniator in the face of your country, and in your beard a liar? The sweat trickled down Saurin's forehead," continues Scully. "His lips were as white as ashes, his jaws elongated, and his mouth unconsciously open, while the lava of the indignant orator poured around him with unsparing tide, and seemed absolutely to dry up and burn the source of respiration."

O'Connell's speech, by most authorities reckoned his greatest forensic effort, set the country wild with enthusiasm and no wonder, for he had bearded the lion of injustice in his very lair, and he had lashed him till his roars of rage were heard to the corners of the land. All the vultures attendant upon the Government of Ireland were screeching and screaming in discordant chorus, for the astounding brazenness of a common demagogue attacking and mocking all sacred things which it had hitherto been considered most shocking sacrilege to breathe the faintest whisper against. In their wrath the Government minions went so far as to try to have O'Connell disrobed or driven from the Bar. But for their petty persecutions, which went by him as the wind, O'Connell was repaid a thousandfold by the exuberant gratitude of a prostrate people arising to the knowledge that they had found, if not a deliverer, at least a defender, who feared not to face and defy their oppressor.1

1 Magee was of course found guilty. He was sentenced to two years' imprisonment and a heavy fine, besides having to find securities to be of good behaviour for seven years. He was, moreover, given another six months' imprisonment, together with a heavy fine, for a further aggravation of his offence in publishing in The Evening Post after the trial a resolution from the Irishmen of Kilkenny, condemnatory of judges and jury, and the whole carriage of the trial.

And if anything was now needed to further endear O'Connell to the people, his duel with D'Esterre supplied it.

D'Esterre was a retired Lieutenant in the English navy, who, by a most audacious bit of bravery, had escaped hanging at the hands of the sailors in the Mutiny of the Nore. He was now a wealthy pork merchant in Dublin, and a member of the Orange Dublin Corporation. O'Connell, having in one of his speeches at the Catholic Association abused the "beggarly Corporation," D'Esterre, then running for High Sheriff, and so coveting popular favour, leapt forward as its defender. He wrote O'Connell a tart letter, demanding to know whether it was true, as reported in the press, that he had applied the opprobrious term to the Corporation. O'Connell made a characteristic reply, wherein refusing to answer yes or no to a demand impertinently made, he at the same time assured D'Esterre that "no terms attributed to me, however reproachful, can exceed the contemptuous feeling I entertain for that body."

O'Connell's reply, evoking from all Dublin another hearty laugh at the ridiculed Corporation, brought from D'Esterre the announcement that he was going to chastise the man publicly. He went about the proceedings elaborately. With horsewhip in hand he set out at an advertised hour from the Mansion House, accompanied by the Lord Mayor and other prominent members and friends of the Corporation, and followed by a crowd that swelled as it went, till the Four Courts was reached.

When O'Connell, who was pleading a case in the courts, heard of the treat that awaited him, he doffed his gown and went out into the hall. But D'Esterre and his friends now considered that the fashionable thoroughfare of Grafton Street, through which the miscreant libeller always passed on his way home, would be a more fitting place to make a public example and point a moral. So they set off again, and took position on the steps of a drapery establishment in the popular street. All Dublin was now agog. Great was the crowd that jammed the thoroughfare. Beauty and Rank at all the windows took advantageous and comfortable positions. And to get satisfactory view of the humiliation of the meddlesome demagogue whose audacity had been getting on their nerves, the noblest and most prominent members of the Administration got the choicest windows and balconies, right above the spot where the victim was to dance to the music of the horsewhip.

When O'Connell heard where he was now expected to present himself for punishment, he took in his fist his good blackthorn, clapped his hat on his head with the slightly rakish tilt that was

his wont, and with a trusty friend on either side jauntily set out to overtake his Nemesis. The sublime seriousness with which the gentleman in Grafton Street apprehended the situation did not properly sink into O'Connell's soul; for, as the giant strode along, he lightly twirled his staff, winked at friends who here and there studded the crowds that lined the way, and with his jokes kept his companions in hearty laughter en route.

The crowd that had followed D'Esterre was but a drop in the ocean to the huzzäing multitude that followed "the Counsellor" (as he was affectionately known to the populace). And when the cheers were heard, and the Counsellor himself and the head of his following were seen, at the foot of Grafton Street, D'Esterre rolled up his horsewhip and retired to a back parlour for meditation. Tory window-holders who had come to feast upon the final humiliation of the bad man of Ireland, had, instead, to endure the deep mortification of seeing him on triumphal march. through Grafton Street, elevated into a favour before undreamt of.

But of course it did not end there. Whatever might or might not be D'Esterre's qualifications with the horsewhip, his skill with the pistol was famous. After first demanding an apology from O'Connell, and getting instead a hearty laugh, he challenged his man to a pistol duel-which Major MacNamara, O'Connell's friend, arranged to take place at four o'clock on the afternoon of the day of the challenge, over the border in Kildare. Though both sides, with a few friends and surgeons, stole off quietly enough to the place of combat, the news overswept Dublin like wildfire, and horses, coaches, traps, gigs, and carts, every vehicle and every animal of burden that could be secured, flew over the road in O'Connell's wake. And when D'Esterre arrived on the field, half an hour late, he was surprised to find there a goodly gathering indeed of all sorts and conditions of Dublin people, in addition to crowds. of Kildare country folk and a throng of citizens from the town of Naas, a few miles distant.

Major MacNamara won the toss for choice of ground. The men were placed, the signal was given-the dropping of a handkerchief-the two fighters, with pistol points lowered, steadily watched each other for half a minute. Then D'Esterre stepped to one side, to confuse his opponent, both pistols came up simultaneously, O'Connell's shot rang out first-and laid D'Esterre upon the ground mortally wounded.

The Dublin Corporation and Tory ascendancy had, in the eyes of the tense crowd, gone down in the person of the seriously

wounded D'Esterre-and from the top of the field where the country people were assembled went up a cheer of triumph that, it may be said, ceased not, till, twenty-four hours later, it had reached the four ends of Ireland.

The man who had thrown the Old Man of the Sea, the aristocratic incubus, off the shoulders of the Catholic Association, who had then made the creatures of the administration yelp under his lash, and made the creatures' masters tremble, had compelled the hierarchy to the side of their people and broken the intrigues of Rome, and had finally overthrown hated privilege in the person of the champion of the most bitterly anti-Irish Orange body that Ireland knew, was now truly the people's Dan!

CHAPTER LXIV

CATHOLIC EMANCIPATION

O'CONNELL now had complete control of the national mind. And his voice was the voice of Ireland. The unquestioning faith of his multitudinous following put in his hands a power which he unsparingly wielded to work out the people's emancipation.

And to that end he spared himself not-either physically or morally, it might be specified. For when George IV of Britain came to visit Ireland in 1821, the popular leader, in anxiety to attain his great end, abased himself and through himself the nation. The abasement was not the less humiliating to Ireland even when we admit that the servile homage which he did George was as much the genuine homage of one who had an almost superstitious reverence for royalty, as it was the blarney of the Prince of Blarney.

The man's ever-amazing veneration and love for the royal representative of that Empire which trod upon his nation's neck, and kept himself and his fellows in servitude, will be treated of later on. Sufficient to say now that to the generations since this has seemed almost an enigma in O'Connell's nature. But the blarney Dan always considered a worthy and legitimate instrument, as it was an effective one, for attaining a good end.

The debauch of debasement in which O'Connell revelled before George was all the more remarkable because nine years before he had held him up to ridicule and opprobrium when, as Prince of Wales, the royal youth had worked maliciously and effectively against Catholic relief. The Catholic Board, under O'Connell's direction of course, passed the celebrated "witchery" resolution, which (between the lines) gave to the scandal-mongering multitude the tid-bit that it was a bigoted anti-Catholic mistress who had compelled the Prince's anti-Irish attitude. The resolution, and O'Connell's flippant treatment of his quasi-secret heart entanglement, had envenomed George against the Irish leader. This well-known fact made all the more strange the leader's effusively enthusiastic humility now. To cap the absurdity, O'Connell was not more delighted at lavishing servile homage upon his royal master than the royal master himself was childishly delighted to receive it.