he Better Time. Mazzini and Herzen, Kossuth and
Ledru-Rollin, Bakounine, Louis Blanc, and a crowd of less eminent
fighters in the everlasting war of human emancipation. The war that
aims at Peace; the strife that assails tyranny, and militarism, and
international hatred. Beginning with Chartism (and narrowly escaping
the fierce penalties suffered by some of his comrades), he grew to
wider activities, and for a moment seemed likely to achieve a bright
position among the liberators of mankind; but Jerome Otway had more
zeal than power, and such powers as he commanded were scattered over
too wide a field of enthusiastic endeavour. He succeeded neither as man
of thought nor as man of action. His verses were not quite poetry; his
prose was not quite literature; personally he interested and exalted,
but without inspiring confidence such as is given to the born leader.
And in this year 1886, when two or three letters on the Irish Question
appeared over his signature, few readers attached any meaning to the
name. Jerome Otway had fought his fight and was forgotten.

He married, for the first time, at one-and-twenty, his choice being the
daughter of an impoverished "county" family, a girl neither handsome
nor sweet-natured, but, as it seemed, much in sympathy with his
humanitarian views. Properly speaking, he did not choose her; the men
who choose, who deliberately select a wife, are very few, and Jerome
Otway could never have been one of them. He was ardent and impulsive;
marriage becoming a necessity, he clutched at the first chance which in
any way addressed his imagination; and the result was calamitous. In a
year or two his wife repented the thoughtlessness with which she had
sacrificed the possibilities of her birth and breeding for marriage
with a man of no wealth. Narrow of soul, with a certain frothy
intelligence, she quickly outgrew the mood of social rebellion which
had originated in personal discontent, and thenceforward she had
nothing but angry scorn for the husband who allowed her to live in
poverty. Two sons were born to them; the elder named Daniel (after
O'Connell), the second called Alexander (after the Russian Herzen). For
twelve years they lived in suppressed or flagrant hostility; then Mrs.
Otway died of cholera. To add to the bitterness of her fate, she had
just received, from one of her "county" relatives, a legacy of a couple
of thousand pounds.

This money, which became his own, Otway invested in a new