Dr. Cullen, is to ask me to make a voyage certain to end in shipwreck, and I respectfully decline." I had much conversation with friends, especially the Bishop of Clogher and the Bishop of Kerry, but I was immovable in my determination not to create another Irish Party. When Lord O'Hagan's Centenary oration was published, I was astonished and pained to find that my friend had used arguments to justify O'Connell's violence towards some of his opponents, which might be employed to justify all Mr. Butt had done, or which had been done on his behalf in these late transactions. I was dumb on the subject except to himself, and I wrote to him tenderly as to a friend I loved:—
You have probably heard already that the Centenary oration greatly pleased your friends. I have heard the warmest praise of it from the best people whom the celebration brought to Dublin. It was vigorous, broad, and comprehensive, and the rhetoric is perfect; but in my inner conscience I felt a want to which I gave no words. The O'Connell you paint is as ideal a personage as the King Arthur of Tennyson. He was no more the generous, single-minded, unselfish hero of your prose idyll than he was the impostor ordinarily presented in the Times—but a strange compound of both.
And unfortunately in his case it is not like painting Brian Borhoime en beau, because the evil consequences of his moral deficiencies are still in full vigour. There were two scenes in Dublin on Friday last, which come very pat to bear me out. In the morning the Lord Mayor invited a popular audience to hear Lord O'Hagan's address, and had his voice drowned with cries of "Butt! Butt!" In the evening when he called on a returned Australian to respond to a toast, again he was met with cries of "Butt! Butt!" Both proceedings were plainly preconcerted, and I thought the occult author of them—not a patriot, but something quite different. But perhaps I did him injustice, if he were tested by the principle,; in your vindication of O'Connell. Mr. Butt, like the other leader, requires "concentration of authority." He has to deal with ignorant and undisciplined masses, and a vigorous will defying and trampling upon opposition is necessary to his success. "If he does not become an autocrat the people will never be welded into an unbroken phalanx," and he is (I infer) entitled to turn a National festival into a drunken row to serve his purpose, if he calls his purpose by a lofty name. Assuredly he has done nothing for which he may not cite a precedent in the conduct of his great predecessor towards Sharman Crawford, Sheil, Purcell, and others.
In an éloge it is not usual to parade a man's faults; but the allowances you ask us to make leave no faults; even his weaknesses lean to virtue's side.
Forgive me this criticism, but I could not say how much I liked the speech without saying also what I missed.
To my wife:
Paris, September 25, 1875.I have bade adieu to the British Isles and am at Paris, the first stage of my return journey to Hawthorn. Since I wrote you last I have been on a
