e
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.

The whole movement in fact was, in the first instance, a literary quite
as much as a political one. Nearly all who took part in it--Gavan Duffy,
John Mitchell, Meagher, Dillon, Davis himself--were very young men, many
fresh from college, all filled with zeal for the cause of liberty and
nationality. The graver side of the movement only showed itself when the
struggle with O'Connell began. At first no idea of deposing, or even
seriously opposing the great leader seems to have be