audaciously, triumphantly successful in his day, and round whom the shadows of night were now gathering so blackly and so swiftly.  Despair was tightening its grip round the hearts of all Irishmen, and it found its strongest hold upon the heart of the greatest Irishman of his age.  Nothing speaks more eloquently of the total change of situation than the pity and respectful consideration extended at this time to O’Connell by men who only recently had exhausted every possibility of vituperation in abuse of the burly demagogue.  In 1847 he resolved to leave Ireland, and to end his days in Rome.  His last public appearance was in the House of Commons, where an attentive and deeply respectful audience hung upon the faultering and barely articulate accents which fell from his lips.  In a few deeply moving words he appealed for aid and sympathy for his suffering countrymen, and left the House; within a few months he had died at Genoa.  Such a bare summary leaves necessarily whole regions of the subject unexplored, but, let the final verdict of history on O’Connell be what it may, that he loved his country passionately, and with an absolute disinterestedness no pen has ever been found to question, nor can we doubt that whatever else may have hastened his end it was the Famine killed him, almost as surely as it did the meanest of its victims.

LVI.

“YOUNG IRELAND.”

The camp and council chamber of the “Young Ireland” party was the editor’s room of The Nation newspaper.  There it found its inspiration, and there its plans were matured—­so far, that is, as they can be said to have been ever matured.  For an eminently readable and all things considered a wonderfully impartial account of this movement, the reader cannot do better than consult Sir Charles Gavan Duffy’s “Four Years of Irish History,” which has the immense advantage of being history taken at first hand, written that is by one who himself took a prominent part in the scenes which he describes.

The most interesting figure in the party had, however, died before those memorable four years began.  Thomas Davis, who was only thirty at the time of his death in 1845, was a man of large gifts, nay, might fairly be called a man of genius.  His poetry is, perhaps, too national to be appreciated out of Ireland, yet two, at least, of his ballads, “Fontenoy” and “The Sack of Baltimore,” may fairly claim to compare with those of any contemporary poet.  His prose writings, too, have much of the same charm, and, if he had no time to become a master of any of the subjects of which he treats, there is something infectious in the very spontaneousness and, as it were, untaught boyish energy of his Irish essays.