to satisfy the more
aggressive and eager of the Irish Parliamentary party. The Land Act had
not taken its place upon the statute book before a meeting of
representative Irishmen was called in Dublin with the view of framing
some scheme of Home Government, and organizing measures for its advocacy
in Parliament, and in the towns and cities of Ireland. In the course of
discussion, one of the speakers used the words "Home Rule," and they
were formally and forthwith adopted as the war-cry of the Nationalist
party.

For the first five years the new organization made little headway. Its
leader, Mr. Isaac Butt, was an able man--a lawyer of some distinction
and a Protestant--but he was not a man to set the Thames on fire; he was
not the man to control the fierce and fiery young politicians that had
begun to flock to the standard of the National cause. With unromantic
dutifulness to his place and his party, he annually brought his motion
for Home Rule before the notice of the House, and was supported by some
fifty or sixty members and a few sympathetic Radicals, but the
Conservative government and its solid majority were of one mind on the
matter. Mr. Butt died in 1879, and Mr. Shaw succeeded to the leadership,
but on the organization of the Land League in the same year, he was
quietly shunted in favor of Mr. Parnell, who, as the _Corypheus_ of the
party, has so far displayed great skill, coolness, and self-command,
and has been rewarded in Ireland by regal ovations, and by the
suggestive title of the "uncrowned king."

Mr. Charles Stewart Parnell, who was declared by one of the speakers at
a recent meeting of Irish citizens held in Faneuil Hall, and more
recently by Mr. J. B. O'Reilly in the _North American Review_, to be of
American birth, is really a man of English descent. One of his ancestors
was the poet Parnell. Another, Sir Henry Parnell, afterwards created
Lord Congleton, was the associate of Lord Grey and Lord Melbourne in the
reform movement of 1829-32. He was a graduate of Cambridge University,
and a Protestant in religion. By birth, by training, and by creed, he
seemed to be of all persons the most unsuited to the task in which he
has been so eminently successful. "In 1871, after some years of travel
in America, among other places, he settled down on his estate at
Avondale, in Wicklow, within whose boundaries is to be found Moore's
Vale of Avoca, with its meeting waters." Like many who in spite of early
failures h