which swept the British forces out of two counties, and might have swept them out of two-and-thirty but for adverse accidents. What men had done, men, with God's help, might do again—and do better, and if Heaven was propitious I might be there to see. From that time my mind was largely occupied with speculations and reveries on Ireland. I read all the books I could buy or borrow on the history and condition of the country, and gradually came to understand the epic of Irish resistance to England, often defeated, often renewed, but never wholly relinquished.
Mr. Teeling made his appearance from time to time in Monaghan, and always brought me sympathy and encouragement. But his most effectual service was to invite me to contribute to his journal, the Northern Herald. I began timidly to send scraps of prose and verse, which were well received. The paper was edited from London by two law students, who poured out weekly long and sonorous essays on the wants and wrongs of Ireland. I read, admired, and emulated these productions, the ordinary stages in selfdiscipline. I made vigorous but quite unsuccessful efforts to draw my comrades into this study, and became, I dare say, under this new passion which entirely engrossed me, an intolerable young prig and pedant. But I obtained ideas more or less exact on many public problems, and began studies which were never to be relinquished. The spirit of the Herald was the old fraternal spirit of '98—the union of Catholics and Protestants for the national cause. The chief contributor was a young Catholic whom I had never seen, but who was destined to be my closest friend through life.[1] His associate was a Protestant of an old plantation house who, in the end, became a clergyman and relinquished his early opinions; but his comrade believed the change to have been an honest one, and maintained a regard for him to the end.[2]
- ↑ Thomas O'Hagan, in the fulness of time Lord O'Hagan, Lord Chancellor of Ireland.
- ↑ While he was still a patriot the second contributor published a narrative poem, "The Warden of Galway" (the Irish Brutus), which contained a ballad beginning, without any regard to Lord Byron's copyright
"The Emerald Isle, the Emerald Isle,
Where Grattan rose and Curran spoke."Some cynical critic suggested that in England it was said of an orator that the honourable gentleman rose and spoke as follows, but that in Ireland the task seemed to be divided, Grattan rose and Curran spoke!
