--now hung
with breathless eagerness over the ordeal to which her last great
champion was subjected.

The crisis in O'Connell's destiny had come.

The glitter of the golden bribe was in his eye; the sound of titled
magnificence was in his ear; the choice was before him to sit high among
the honorable, the titled, and the powerful, or to take his humble seat
in the hall of St. Stephen's as the Irish demagogue, the agitator, the
Kerry representative. He did not hesitate in his choice. On the first
occasion that offered he told the story of Ireland's wrongs, and demanded
justice in the name of his suffering constituents. He had put his hand
to the plough of reform, and he could not relinquish his hold, for his
heart was with it.

Determined to give the Whig administration no excuse for neglecting the
redress of Irish grievances, he entered heart and soul into the great
measure of English reform, and his zeal, tact, and eloquence contributed
not a little to its success. Yet even his friends speak of his first
efforts in the House of Commons as failures. The Irish accent; the harsh
avowal of purposes smacking of rebellion; the eccentricities and flowery
luxuriance of an eloquence nursed in the fervid atmosphere of Ireland
suddenly transplanted to the cold and commonplace one of St. Stephen's;
the great and illiberal prejudices against him scarcely abated from what
they were when, as the member from Clare, he was mobbed on his way to
London, for a time opposed a barrier to the influence of his talents and
patriotism. But he triumphed at last: the mob-orator of Clare and Kerry,
the declaimer in the Dublin Rooms of the Political and Trades' Union,
became one of the most attractive and popular speakers of the British
Parliament; one whose aid has been courted and whose rebuke has been
feared by the ablest of England's representatives. Amid the sneers of
derision and the clamor of hate and prejudice he has triumphed,--on that
very arena so fatal to Irish eloquence and Irish fame, where even Grattan
failed to sustain himself, and the impetuous spirit of Flood was stricken
down.

No subject in which Ireland was not directly interested has received a
greater share of O'Connell's attention than that of the abolition of
colonial slavery. Utterly detesting tyranny of all kinds, he poured
forth his eloquent soul in stern reprobation of a system full at once of
pride and misery and oppression, and darkened with blood. His sp