sion.

He had a true conception of what a great teacher ought to be; and for
this reason he kept repeating his principles and his arguments in the
same or almost the same words. Many an admirer of his thought he dosed
his countrymen far too much with, "first flower of the earth," and
"Hereditary bondsmen;" but, as he said about his attacks on men, it was
_calculation_ made him do it, and he proclaimed this so late as 1846, at
the Repeal Association, in the following words: "I have often said, and
repeated it over and over again, that I had found, that it was not
sufficient in politics to enunciate a new proposition, one, or two, or
three times. I continue to repeat it, until it comes back like an echo
from the different parts of the country; then I know it is understood,
and I leave it to its fate." The lesson had been learned.

Physically, O'Connell was a very powerful man. He was taller than he
seemed, his muscular frame taking away, in appearance, from his height.
The earliest portraits of him make him a soft-faced athletic young man,
very likely to be a dangerous antagonist in the prize ring, but his
features, as given at the time, bear scarcely any resemblance to later
portraits of him. His shoulders were broad, and in walking he pushed
them forward alternately in a rather remarkable manner. This
peculiarity, arising more from physical necessity than from choice, gave
him a sort of slinging gait, which caused a Tory print to call him,
derisively, "Swaggering Dan." This nickname of their favourite did not
offend the people, they even thought it appropriate, there was such a
dashing independence in his whole manner; and Shiel never wrote anything
more felicitously true, than when he said of him--"He shoulders his
umbrella like a pike, and throws out his legs, as if he were kicking
Protestant ascendancy before him."

O'Connell was a liberal in the highest sense; he loved toleration; but
he was also a Catholic to the heart's core--thorough, uncompromising:
proud of the down-trodden Church to which he belonged, with--at first,
perhaps, an intuitive feeling; later on, the proud consciousness, that
his name would be linked with her struggles and her triumphs.

"One of my earliest aspirations," he more than once said, "was to do
something for the good of my country, and write my name on the page of
her history." He was fervently devoted to the holy practices of the
Catholic Church. The fatal result of his duel with Capt