are now allowed to approach the front, but at the closest quarters, riding through the lines on his mule, and seeing the engagements vividly, so that he was able to describe them in moving detail for readers of the Times.  O’Donovan—­son of Dr. John O’Donovan, the distinguished Irish scholar and archaeologist—­was in the service of the London Daily News.  That dashing campaigner—­as his famous book, The Merv Oasis, shows him to have been—­perished with Hicks Pasha’s Army in the Sudan in November, 1883.  At the same time James O’Kelly, also of the Daily News, was lost in the desert, trying to join the forces of the victorious Sudanese under the Madhi.  Ten years before that he had accomplished, for the New York Herald, the equally daring and hazardous feat of joining the Cuban rebels in revolt against Spain.  He escaped the perils of the Mambi Land and the Sudan, and survived to serve Ireland for many years as a Nationalist member in the British parliament.  John Augustus O’Shea, better known, perhaps, as “The Irish Bohemian”, also deserves remembrance for his quarter of a century’s work as special correspondent in Europe—­including Paris during the siege—­for the London Standard.

Indeed, no matter to what side of journalism we turn, we find Irishmen filling the foremost and the highest places.  John Thaddeus Delane, under whose editorship the Times became for a time the most influential newspaper in the world, was of Irish parentage.  The first editor of the Illustrated London News (1842)—­one of the pioneers in the elucidation of news by means of pictures—­was an Irishman, Frederick Bayley.  Among the projectors of Punch, and one of its earliest contributors, was a King’s county man, Joseph Sterling Coyne.  The founder of the Liverpool Daily Post (1855), the first penny daily paper in Great Britain, was Michael Joseph Whitty, a Wexford man.  His son, Edward M. Whitty, was the originator of that interesting feature of English and Irish journalism, the sketch of personalities and proceedings in parliament.  Of the editors of the Athenaeum—­for many years the leading English organ of literary criticism—­one of the most famous was Dr. John Doran, who was of Irish parentage.  “Dod” is a familiar household word in the British Parliament.  It is the name of the recognized guide to the careers and political opinions of Lords and Commons.  Its founder was an Irishman, Charles Roger Dod, who for twenty-three years was a parliamentary reporter for the Times.  And what name sheds a brighter light on the annals of British journalism for intellectual and imaginative force than that of Justin MacCarthy, novelist and historian, as well as newspaper writer?