the rudiments of a poet and an orator, and in the end no one but Thomas Davis brought such splendid faculties to the National cause. But there were drawbacks which long masked the depth and range of his powers from his associates. In the midst of a group of self-confident, somewhat dandified young men, he looked ill-dressed and underbred, and till the exercise of authority much later gave him self-reliance, he seemed painfully deferential. By some strange freak of nature his features were almost African in cast, and scoffers parodied his name into Darky M'Gee. He was as uncomely as John Philpot Curran, but almost as liberally endowed with powers, which made one forget his defects. When I thought of him as a recruit, M'Gee was in London revelling in Irish annals in the British Museum, and I found that he had entered into an engagement with the Freeman's Journal, from which there was no honourable escape. He sent from time to time letters to the Nation, chiefly of historical criticism, but a closer connection was impossible at the moment.[1]
The eldest son of the popular Mayor of Waterford had contributed some verses of no great merit to the Nation, and I knew him only as a partisan of our opinions. But he wrote me a letter on Davis's death, so generous and elevated in spirit, that I was greatly touched, and made the young man's personal acquaintance. He was in his twenty-second year, and he had an English manner and accent which perplexed me. This was Thomas Francis Meagher, destined in a brief
- ↑ Sir Samuel Ferguson, an eminently competent judge on such a question, regarded M'Gee as the most gifted of the Young Ireland poets. I quote his language from the graphic memoir of Sir Samuel by his wife. Personally I would place M'Gee, not as Ferguson does, but after Davis and Mangan, and before all the rest:—
"Other young spirits," says Sir Samuel, "came into contact with me at this period, destined afterwards to be poetically famous as the singers of the Nation, and politically conspicuous as the leaders of the party known as Young Ireland." Here was the spark destined to kindle the souls of these tiery young men who thought to guide the destinies of Ireland by making her ballads. Davis and Duffy, Mangan and MacCarthy, and later on Thomas D'Arcy M'Gee, the greatest poet of them all, burst into song, and while I followed up the endeavour to elevate the romance of Irish history into the realm of legitimate history in the "Hibernian Nights' Entertainment "in the University, awoke the whole country to high and noble aspirations through their fine enthusiasm in the "Spirit of the Nation."
