Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 2.djvu/45

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THE REVIVAL OF THE "NATION"
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perienced judgment, as he came to extend his circle of acquaintances. With the exception of a few converts who had followed him from England, the body of professors was taken from the Young Ireland party and their immediate friends. If I had the selection of them, they could scarcely have been chosen otherwise; but the committee for collecting funds and determining the principles and discipline of the institution, which consisted in equal numbers of prelates, priests of the second order, and laymen, was differently constituted. The laymen were respectable nonentities or shrewd men of business, who knew no more of a University than of astrology. The most notable of them was Charles Bianconi, the. proprietor of the passenger cars so famous in Munster. My friend, Dr. Moriarty, said Bianconi was certainly a man of extensive reading, but it lay chiefly among weigh-bills. O'Hagan, O'Loghlen, Moore, Lucas, and other conspicuous Catholics were altogether excluded. It soon leaked out that Dr. Newman proposed to invite me to become Professor of Modern History, but Dr. Cullen peremptorily objected. I was a bad man, he conceived, "at the bottom of all evil designs, and in short the Mazzini of Ireland." Dr. Newman was too discreet and too new to the country to resist this strong opinion. Mr. Henry Wilberforce, secretary at this time of the Catholic Defence Association, who had come over to Dublin with the converts, and whom I had met occasionally with Lucas, said to me soon afterwards that he liked me much, but he wished I would wait till I became known before accepting any responsible position. "Yes," I said, "I have lived barely five-and-thirty years in this island, but I will endeavour to be patient till men who arrived here last year have made up their minds about me." I met Dr. Newman habitually at Dr. James Quinn's, and friendly relations grew up which were never interrupted. Dr. Quinn, who was headmaster of the principal Catholic school in Dublin, and afterwards Bishop of Brisbane, was a kinsman of Dr. Cullen's, but did not accept the opinions of his distinguished relative in my regard. One of the converts of whom I saw a good deal assured me that the Oxford Movement began in Ireland. In his opinion Bishop Jebb, and still more his friend Alexander Knox, for a time private secretary to Lord