me that it might be still carried on for the purpose for which it was created, I removed to Dublin in the autumn of the same year (1842), and the first number of the Nation was published on the 15th of October. Before leaving Belfast I took another decisive step in life by becoming engaged to be married to one who had sweetened my life during my residence in that conventicle.[1]
A little earlier I was invited to a public dinner in Edinburgh, and saw that fine city for the first time. I was more anxious to see Christopher North than the Calton Hill, but did not succeed. Perhaps I escaped being impaled on an epigram. A dozen years earlier John Lawless, my predecessor as a National journalist in Belfast, was entertained by his admirers in Edinburgh, and "Crusty Christopher" declared in the "Noctes" that "the editor from Belfast was as great a goose as ever gabbled on a green or was grilled on a gridiron."
- ↑ My future wife was Emily, daughter of Francis M'Laughlin, a Belfast merchant, and grand-daughter in the maternal line of The MacDermott of Coulavin, one of the two or three Celtic families in Ireland whose hereditary title had survived to the nineteenth century. Her only child, John Gavan Duffy, is a Cabinet Minister in Australia when these pages are being written.
