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DANIEL O'CONNELL
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SIR ISAAC ?rru
CORNER, E.C
DANIEL O'CONNELL: HIS EARLY LIFE,
AND
JOURNAL, 1795 TO 1802.
BY
ARTHUR HOUSTON, LL.D., DUBLIN,
One of His Majestfs Counsel
" Let all the ends thou almost at be thy country's^ Thy God's, and truth'' s.''
— King Henry VIII., Act 3, Sc. 2
LONDON: SIR ISAAC PITMAN & SONS, LTD., I, AMEN CORNER, E.C. 1906
BRADBUKY, AGNEW, & CO. LD., PRINTERS, LONDON AND TONBRIDGE.
m
no6
INTRODUCTION
The Journal of Daniel O'Connell, so far as it is extant, is now for the first time published in its entirety, with the omission of the name of one person, and of a paragraph containing an uncom- plimentary reference to the personal appearance of a lady. Select passages from it appeared in the tenth volume of the Irish Monthly^ about twenty- four years ago, but did not attract as much attention as they deserved. Mr. Macdonagh, in his Life of O'Connell, has drawn largely on the Irish Monthly. The extracts from the Journal to be found in these two works, besides omitting much that is of im- portance and interest, are given without those explanations which are necessary for a due appre- ciation of this valuable fragment. The Editor hopes that the notes which are appended to each entry and the observations made in this Intro- duction, taken in conjunction with the sketch of O'Connell's life up to the date when the Journal commences which follows it, will supply the deficiency.
At first blush the Journal is disappointing. It is
?^^7'1S1
vi DANIEL O'CONNELL
singularly wanting in references to the matters upon which one would naturally expect it to enlarge, O'Connell's call to the Irish bar, his early successes, the rebellion of 1798, the Union, for example. With the exception of the rebellion of 1798, which is mentioned as having been the subject of a conversation between O'Connell and his friend Richard Newton Bennett, not one of these things is alluded to.
But if the Journal fails to satisfy the reader's curiosity upon matters such as these, it makes up for the omission by giving him full information as to the works which O'Connell studied between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-seven, that is to say, the most impressionable period of a man's life, and by letting him into the secret of the objects which O'Connell set before him and the principles by which he proposed to regulate his conduct.
The following is a classified list of the works mentioned by O'Connell in the Journal : —
Biography.
Boswell's Life of Johnson; Condorcet's Life of Turgot; Johnson's Life of Cowley ; Murphy's Life of Johnson ; Milton's Life ; Plutarch's Life ; Rous- seau's Confessions.
Fiction.
Caleb Williams ; Hugh Trevor ; The Ring ; The Man of Feeling.
INTRODUCTION vii
History.
Adams's History of Republics ; Barthelemy's Travels of Anacharsis ; Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Henry's History of England ; Mirabeau's Cour de Berlin ; Whitaker's History of Manchester.
Law.
Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England ; Boote's Historical Account of a Suit at Law ; Coke's Commentary on Littleton's Treatise on Land Tenures ; Cruise on Fines ; Cummin on Fee Tail.
Natural Science.
Buffon's Natural History ; Dutens' Les Origines des Decouvertes attributes aux Modernes ; Hall's Encyclopcedia, title " Aerology " ; Memoires de r Academic des Sciences, article on observations made on the planet Jupiter and its satellites by Cassini.
Poetry.
Akenside's Pleasures of Imagination; Cowley's Poems ; Johnson's London and Vanity of Human Wishes ; Macpherson's Ossian ; Milton's Paradise Lost ; Pindar's Poems ; Shakespeare ; Voltaire's Tragedies.
Political and Social Science.
Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations ; Bolingbroke's Answer to the ^^ London jfournar\- Bolingbroke's
viii DANIEL O'CONNELL
Vindication ; Colquhoun's Police of London; Godwin's Political Justice ; Hume's Essays ; The Jockey Club ; Manual of Liberty ; O'Brien's pamphlet against the Ministry entitled Utrum Horum ; The Rolliad ; Voltaire's works ; Wolstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women.
Theology.
The Bible ; Blair's Sermons ; Paine's Age of Reason; Recueil Necessaire ; Z a.pa.ia.'s Questions.
Miscellaneous.
Bayle's Dictionary; Collins's Account of New South Wales ; Encyclopcedia Britannica, title " Gladi- ator " ; Encyclopedie, title " Gladiateur " ; Gibbon's Miscellaneous Works ; Grose's A ntiquities of Ireland ; Plan of a Dictionary, by Dr. Johnson; Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy ; a play the name of which is not given.
During the period embraced by the Journal O'Connell doubtless studied other works besides those enumerated in the foregoing list, for there are wide gaps in the Journal, one extending from January 13th to December 31st, 1798, and another from January 2nd, 1799, to June 4th, 1802. Besides, he mentions in the entry under date December 12th, 1795, that he intends to record only the important ones among the books which he reads.
INTRODUCTION ix
The most striking fact that appears from a perusal of the above list is that O'Connell studied such works as Paine's Age of Reason and the Recueil Necessaire. That they had a transient influence on his mind is obvious, not merely from the observations made upon them in the Journal and the remark made by Miss Hunter that " in fifty years he would doubt whether he was a man or a cabbage-stump, so much was he inclined to scepticism," but from such passages as these. Speaking of the second part of Paine's Age of Reason, he says : " It has put the foundation of the religious question of the Christians in a point of view in which a judgment is easily formed on its solidity. I now have no doubts on this head. I may certainly be mistaken. But I am not wilfully mistaken, if the expression has any meaning. My mistakes I refer to the mercy of that Being who is wise by excellence. To the God of nature do I turn my heart ; to the meditation of His works I turn my thoughts. In Him do I find my soul saturated. He will not, justice tells me, punish for a darkness, if such it be, that cannot be removed ; He will not punish for the unbiassed conviction of the soul. To affirm the contrary would, in my apprehension, be to calumniate." Again he exclaims, " Oh, Eternal Being, Thou seest the purity of my heart, the sincerity of my promises. Should I appear before Your august tribunal after having performed them, shall I not be entitled to
X DANIEL O'CONNELL
call for my reward ? Will the omission of a super- stitious action, will the disbelief of an unreasonable dogma, that day rise in judgment against me ? Oh, God, how hast Thou been calumniated ! " " Religious subjects," he writes on January 20th, 1796, " engross much of my attention. The preju- dices of childhood and youth at times frighten and shake the firmness of my soul. These fears, these doubts, perhaps imply a libel on the First Cause. ... It is impossible that He whose justice is perfect should punish with eternal torments the belief which is founded on conviction." His reflec- tions on death, inspired by the last moments of the expiring year 1795, show that he doubted the immortality of the soul. After dilating on the dissolution of the body into its component elements, he proceeds, " But the mind, the mind ! Through what variety of untried being is that to roam ? What changes is it to suffer ? Does it perish as a dependant on the corporal system ? . . . Our best surmises are founded on an analogy. Now what analogy can there be between any part of corporal existence and the state of the mind when separated from the body, supposing separation actually takes place ? "
It can hardly be doubted that when the passages above quoted were penned O'Connell was inclined to that deism which Paine and those of his school preached. It is needless to say that such studies had no permanent effect on the religious convictions of
INTRODUCTION xi
the Liberator, who lived and died a most devout Catholic, and maintained that errors in faith were more dangerous than errors in morals. But they probably had a good deal to do with that large tolerance that he extended to those who differed from him in matters of belief, for, however much he may subsequently have dissented from the conclu- sions drawn by Paine and the contributors to the Recueil Necessaire, he could hardly help being con- vinced of the purity of their motives and their sincerity in the pursuit of what they believed to be truth.
The study of such works on political philosophy as Godwin's Political Justice left, however, a more permanent impression on O'Connell's mind.
Godwin's work appeared in 1793, a most inauspi- cious time for a treatise which assailed monarchy, aristocracy, property, and everything that the French revolution swept away, and that the ruling classes in England were straining every nerve to maintain. But while Godwin attacked these venerable institutions as being pernicious, he denounced the idea of unnecessarily resorting to force for their destruction. He relied almost entirely on the influence of reason. "If," he says, "the cause we plead be the cause of truth, there is no doubt that by reasonings, if sufficiently zealous and constant, the same purpose may be effected in a mild and liberal way. In a word, it is proper to recollect here what has been established as to the doctrine of force in general, that it is in no case to
xii DANIEL O'CONNELL
be employed but where every other means is ineffectual." This was practically the attitude which O'Connell took up. "The altar of liberty," he writes on December 2gth, 1796, "totters when it is cemented only with blood." But he carried the doctrine too far when, in after-life, he laid down the principle that the best possible political revolution was not worth the shedding of a single drop of human blood, an idea which he may have imbibed from Rousseau, who said that the justest revolution would be bought too dearly by the blood of a single citizen.
His success in obtaining Catholic emancipation appeared to justify the view that Godwin put for- ward and O'Connell adopted. But when it was applied in the case of the repeal of the Union, it failed, and its failure broke O'Connell's heart. Godwin pointed to the American revolution and the French revolution as examples of changes brought about without the use of force to any considerable extent, the public mind having been previously educated up to the necessary point. O'Connell's "Agitate ! agitate ! " was only the maxims of Godwin put into a terse form.
No one who reads the Journal can have a doubt of the loftiness and purity of O'Connell's motives as a public man. It was not intended for publication. It was kept partly for amusement, but chiefly for self-improvement. Rewrites, "Since I commenced this Journal at Chiswick I have felt many salutary
INTRODUCTION xiii
effects from thus taking a retrospective view of my conduct. I study much more than I did before." On another occasion he says, "I know that to persevere in it" — the resolution to write up the Journal regularly — "would be of the greatest utility to me. Did I regularly record the day, shame would prevent me from being negligent. The perusal of my Journal would be the best reward of my diligence, the surest punishment of idleness."
To his Journal, as to a trusted friend, he confides the secrets of his heart, and there we may read his character as in a mirror. He chides himself for his slothfulness, his indulgence in sleep, his inattention to matters of business, his propensity to untruth, his inclination to intemperance. He makes resolu- tions to reform in these matters, and records his success or failure.
Two great principles he lays down for his own guidance : the practice of private virtue and the promotion of his country's good. Writing on March 25th, 1797, he says, " Virtue, thou certainly art more than a name. Thou bestowest firmness and quietude on the heart of mortal, whilst thou exaltest his conceptions. . . . After having, in the conviction of my soul, made this eulogium on virtue, let me tremble whilst I ask myself how much of myself entered into my desire or dread of a revolution. Oh, if I was possessed of virtue, I would wish for the happiness alone of mankind. If I possessed virtue, I would meet every
xiv DANIEL O'CONNELL
event without shrinking." He says again on the last day of the year 1798, " I have several resolu- tions formed. . . . My first resolution is no less than to be virtuous. This includes everything. ... I know that to be virtuous is to be happy. Everything that is contrary to our happiness is necessarily and of consequence contrary to virtue." He repeats these sentiments again in a subsequent entry, and in one of the latest he ever made bewails the weakening which he imagines he feels in his love for virtue.
But perhaps the most interesting passages in the Journal are those in which he declares the principles by which he will regulate his conduct in public life. O'Connell, like other great men, early felt the stirrings of ambition in his breast. They appeared when he was but a child, as an incident narrated below and his own statement to O'Neill Daunt attest. In a letter to his uncle written on December loth, 1795, he owns to having " a glow- ing and enthusiastic ambition." In his Journal he frankly confesses his love of fame. " I know," he writes on January 25th, 1797, " that praise is useless to the dead, yet I would not die unknown." But the ambition which he felt, and which he cherished, had nothing sordid or selfish about it. The entry under date January 7th of the same year contains this passage : " I would, and I trust I will, serve man. I feel, I really feel, the sacred and mild warmth of true patriotism. I will endeavour to make the narrow circle of my friends happy, I will
INTRODUCTION xv
endeavour to give cheerfulness and ease to the peasantry over whom I may command, I will endeavour to give liberty to my country, and I will endeavour to increase the portion of the knowledge and virtue of humankind." " Sometimes," he writes — "and indeed this happens most frequently — I am led away by vanity and ambition to imagine that I shall cut a great figure on the theatre of the world ; sometimes I fear that I shall never be able to rise to mediocrity. But this I always think, that nothing could shake the steadiness with which I would pursue the good of my country.*^ On February 20th, 1797, O'Connell listened to a debate in the Irish House of Commons. On the same evening he records his impressions of the oratory of Sir Lawrence Parsons, and adds, "I too will be a member. Young as I am, unacquainted with the ways of the world, I should not even now appear contemptible. I will stead- fastly and perseveringly attach myself to the real interests of Ireland. I shall endeavour equally to avoid the profligacy of corruption and the violence of unreasonable patriotism. Of real patriotism moderation is the chief mark."
Surely in these passages this youth of twenty-one places before himself a noble and lofty ideal. How comprehensive are his aims. All mankind he will seek to . serve by endeavouring to increase the knowledge and virtue of the human race. His country he will seek to serve by attaching himself to her real interests and promoting them, not by
xvi DANIEL O'CONNELL
wild projects of rebellion or revolution, but by gradual and peaceful reform. The tenantry over whom he may exercise control he will seek to serve by making their lives comfortable and pleasant. His friends, a comparatively narrow circle when he wrote, but a wide one when he became more widely known, he will seek to serve by endeavouring to make them happy. He sums it all up in one sentence, where he says, while lamenting the death of a friend of his boyhood and moralising on the short- ness of life, " I will make my heart a heart of love."
It falls to the lot of few men, if indeed it falls to the lot of any, to realise their ideals. O'Connell did not quite succeed in reaUsing his. But he had a large measure of success. After a score of years of strenuous exertion, he achieved the political emancipation of his co-religionists. Before another score of years had passed he had sunk beneath the weight of the huge task he set himself half a century before, and had died in the endeavour to give liberty to his country. But the labour of the closing years of his life has not been in vain. He found the peasantry of Ireland broken in spirit, despairing ; he left them courageous and hopeful, ready to follow, as they have followed, the leaders who have pursued the same paths of peaceful and constitutional agitation which it is the great merit of O'Connell to have marked out. The fervour of his eloquence, the fire of his enthusiasm, the force
INTRODUCTION xvii
of his energy, and the brightness of his example, infused Hfe into the dry bones of Irish NationaHty, which to-day is a greater power than it ever was, except, perhaps, when, in 1782, Ireland wrung from the Parliament of England the independence of her own. What may be the result of the long struggle for Irish autonomy no one, so far as the near future is concerned, can venture with confidence to predict. But that it is destined ultimately to suc- ceed no one who is acquainted with the past, and can read the signs of the times, will venture to deny.
The reference to corruption in the last of the extracts above made is noticeable. Unacquainted, as O'Connell says he was, with the ways of the world, he evidently was aware how great a part "the profligacy of corruption" played in the politics of Ireland. He declared his intention of eschewing it. No man's hands were ever freer from corrup- tion than his. He would never accept rank or place. In a letter written to Edward Dwyer from London, which is without date, but bears the London postmark, December 4th, 1830, he says, "The Irish appointments are not yet made out. . . . You will of course hear a good deal about me — I fancy Mahony wrote to Conway that I was to become a tame elephant — but they know little of me. Bah ! What do I care for all they could give me except the liberty of Ireland ? That, and that alone, is my bribe. Whenever you hearthat I am accepting office, pledge yourself to its being false. I would take
D.c. B
xviii DANIEL O'CONNELL
office for only one purpose, for which the times are not ripe — that is, the amicable settlement of the terms on which the Union was to be repealed." That either title or place was offered to him at this time is apparent from the letter to O'Connell from his wife, which is also undated, but bears the Dublin postmark of December 3rd, 1830, and is copied in full in a note to the entry under date December 13th, 1795* Or^ May 27th, 1833, he wrote to Fitzpatrick, " How can you be so weak as to credit any idle story of my being to be called to the English bar, or to stay in this country? I am wedded to Ireland for life, whatever may be my dower. I do believe that if I chose I could be Master of the Rolls in this country. But keep this fact to yourself I would not accept the office of English Chancellor. In short, my ambition and my pride, as well as my first and most sacred duty, bind me to struggle for her, and I will struggle for her." How well the sentiments expressed in this letter accord with the resolve recorded by the writer six-and-thirty years before.
In his letter to the Earl of Shrewsbury defending his claim to the repeal rent, he writes, " The year before emancipation, though wearing a stuff gown, and belonging to the outer bar, my pro- fessional emoluments exceeded ;f 8,000, an amount never before realised in Ireland in the same time by an outer barrister.
" Had I adhered to my profession, I must have
INTRODUCTION xix
been called within the bar, and obtained the pre- cedency of a silk gown. The severity of my labour would have been mitigated, whilst the emoluments would have been considerably increased. I could have done a much greater variety of business with less toil, and my professional income must have necessarily been augmented by probably one half.
" If I had abandoned politics, even the honours of my profession and its highest stations lay fairly before me.
" But I dreamed a day-dream — was it a dream ? That Ireland still wanted me ; that although the Catholic aristocracy and gentry of Ireland had obtained most valuable advantages from emancipa- tion, yet the benefit of good government had not reached the great mass of the Irish people, and could not reach them unless the Union- should be made a reality, or unless that hideous measure should be abrogated.
" I did not hesitate as to my course. My former success gave me personal advantage such as no other man could easily procure. I flung away the profession ; I gave its emoluments to the winds ; I closed the vista of its honours and dignities ; I embraced the cause of my country : and, come weal or come woe, I have made a choice at which I have never repined, nor ever shall repent.
" High professional promotion was placed within my reach. The office of the Lord Chief Baron of the Exchequer became vacant. I was off'ered it, or
B 2
XX DANIEL O'CONNELL
had I preferred the office of the Master of the Rolls, the alternative was proposed to me. It was a tempting offer. Its value was enhanced by the manner in which it was made, and pre-eminently so by the person by whom it was made — the best Englishman that Ireland ever saw, the Marquis of Normanby. But I dreamed again a day-dream — was it a dream ? — and I refused the offer. And here am I now taunted, even by you, with sordid motives."
It was in 1838 that he received the offer of being made Chief Baron. " On the morning that he received it," says O'Neill Daunt {Personal Recollections, i. 36), " he walked to the window, saying, ' This is very kind, very kind indeed, but I haven't the least notion of taking the offer. Ireland could not spare me now. Not but that, if she could, this office would have great attractions for me. ... In fact, I should enjoy the office exceedingly on every account if I could but accept it consistently with the interests of Ireland, but I cannot.' "
" I'll take nothing for myself while Ireland wants me," said O'Connell to a friend who suggested that a seat in the House of Lords, with the title of Viscount O'Connell, would be a glorious termination to his political career.
Though O'Connell felt able to say of himself to O'Neill Daunt, " If I know myself well, I really do think I never did any one action with a view to
INTRODUCTION xxi
fame," yet there can be no doubt but that he had a healthy desire for distinction, but distinction won in the field where success was gained by honourable and peaceful means, and meant a triumph for the cause of his country, and the liberties of mankind. " What thou wouldst highly, that wouldst thou holily," might with justice have been written of O'Connell.
His devotion to liberty is shown by the Journal to have been real and passionate. In the first entry that is extant he displays his contempt for those who would persuade him that the slave loved his chains and mourned over their loss. One of the books that he read through was The Manual of Liberty. Over and over again he records his attachment to the great principle of human freedom. On December 29th, 1796, he writes, " I love, from my heart I love, liberty. I do not express myself properly. Liberty is in my bosom less a principle than a passion. . . . The liberty which I look for is that which would increase the happiness of mankind. In the service of that liberty I have devoted my life and whatever portion of talents I may have or acquire." On January 22nd in the following year he tells us that he and Dawson and Bennett " talked some pure, because moderate, democracy," and then follows this outburst : " Hail, Liberty! How cheering is thy name. How happy would mankind be if thou wert universally dif- fused." On March 24th he writes again, " I love
xxii DANIEL O'CONNELL
liberty — and this is a moment fit for indulging reflection on that subject — I love liberty as conducive to increase the portion of human happiness."
These were not mere words. O'Connell never lost an opportunity of putting the principles here enunciated into practice. When, for example, the fate of the English Reform Bill of 1832 hung in the balance, O'Connell boldly pronounced in its favour, and it was carried by the votes of his followers in the House of Commons, though this particular Bill was afterwards thrown out on an amendment. At a meeting of the National Political Union held in January, 1832, O'Connell was urged to oppose the Bill because equal justice was not done to Ireland. He refused. " I will ever," said he, "assist those who are struggling for freedom, no matter what their creed, nation, or class may be, without reference to its effect on our claims."
Many other instances of O'Connell's active support of the principles enunciated in his Journal might be given. Thus on May 17th, 1830, he spoke in favour of the Bill for the removal of Jewish disabilities. " He should," he said, "support the Bill on the prin- ciple of toleration, if that were not an improper word to be used on such an occasion. Perhaps he should have said the principle of right." He was in favour of universal suffrage and vote by ballot, as his speech on the National Petition delivered on May 3rd, 1842, and his speech on the Address delivered on August 27th, 1847, will attest. He was, as
INTRODUCTION xxiii
O'Neill Daunt records {Personal Recollections, ii. 112), in favour of international arbitration, one of his day-dreams being that the Pope should be the arbitrator.
O'Connell said that all the principles of his subse- quent political life were contained in his first speech, namely that which he made in opposition to the Union on January 13th, 1800. It would be equally true to say that those principles were con- tained in his Journal. Political consistency is not necessarily a virtue, for it may be, and often is, the outcome of prejudice, or self-interest, or obstinacy, or ignorance, or stupidity. But when it is the off- spring of sound principles, rooted in honest con- viction, the result of study and reflection, and when it is displayed in the face of obloquy, and at the cost of great personal sacrifices, then it is indeed a noble trait of character. To political consistency of this lofty type could O'Connell justly lay claim.
Whether the study of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations extended beyond that part of the work which deals with the benefits derived from division of labour does not appear from the Journal. But it seems probable that he read beyond this point, as he was strongly in favour of Free Trade, so far, at any rate, as regarded corn. His letter to the Earl of Shrewsbury, who sought by means of a pamphlet that he published to enlist the Catholics on the side of the corn laws on religious grounds, is one of the most brilliant attacks on Protection and one of
xxiv DANIEL O'CONNELL
the most powerful defences of free trade in food ever penned. O'Connell denounced in scathing language the attempt thus made by this Catholic nobleman to uphold what he described as "the hard- hearted iniquity of the corn laws," "the grinding bread-tax." In his speech on the Address, August 27th, 1841, he said, "Indeed, Ireland illustrates the fallacy of some of the topics used by the supporters of these laws. It is said that they increase the rate of wages. If they have that operation anywhere, surely it is in Ireland. Ireland has the full benefit of the corn laws, and yet there is the rate of wages lower than in any part of the kingdom. Ireland is an agricultural country : you have taken care that she shall not be a manufacturing country ; but people see distinctly that corn laws do not raise the rate of wages, and they feel, and I feel, that it is a robbery upon the operative to make him pay more for his bread than his earnings enable him to pay." Having regard to the part which duelling played in O'Connell's public life, the passage in his Journal dealing with this practice possesses considerable interest. He had a quarrel with a Mr. Douglas Thompson, the son of a brewer in Chiswick, who sent him a letter demanding an explanation of some strong language that O'Connell had used towards him. Having no "friend" available to carry a message, O'Connell called on Thompson in person, and discussed the matter standing at the street door of Thompson's father's house. Thompson was so
INTRODUCTION xxv
little satisfied with their interview that he rushed into the house and got a cane, with which he struck O'Connell, who, though much his superior in strength and armed with a heavy cane, did not return the blow, but contented himself with seizing his assailant. The sequel will be found described in the Journal under the date December 2gth, 1795, and subsequent entries. His observations on this incident are curious and characteristic. He discusses duelling in quite a philosophic spirit. " I reflect with pleasure," he says, "on the courage which I felt on this occasion. All I have to fear is precipitation in plunging myself in future quarrels. I know that duelling is a vice ; yet there is a charm in the independence which it bestows on a man that endears it even to many thinking minds. I have, however, made a resolution not to fight a duel from the time that I become independent of the world." The courage which O'Connell felt on this occasion he displayed on that of his famous duel with D'Esterre ; but that species of courage he renounced for ever after. In his speech on the police trials in Ireland, replying to Doherty, the Irish Attorney-General, he said, "I will not be deterred from doing my duty fearlessly by any man, however he may be supported. In sa.ymg fearlessly I allude not to that species of courage which is recognised in a court of honour, and of which I know nothing. There is blood upon this hand ; I regret it deeply, and he knows it. He knows that
xxvi DANIEL O'CONNELL
I have a vow in heaven, else he would not have ventured to address to me such language, or to use those taunts which in this House he has safely resorted to."
It has been thought advisable to prefix to the Journal a sketch of O'Connell's life during the period anterior to the commencement of that record of his sayings and doings, so as to enable the reader better to appreciate what he will there find set down by the Liberator himself. This, with the Journal itself and the notes appended to it, will form as complete a biography of O'Connell during the first six or seven-and-twenty years of his life as can be compiled from the materials available for the purpose.
The Editor has to express his thanks to Mr. John Murray for permission to quote from Fitzpatrick's Correspondence of Daniel O'Connell, to Mrs. Morgan John O'Connell for permission to quote from The Last Colonel of the Irish Brigade, to the Rev. Matthew Russell, SJ., for permission to quote from the Irish Monthly, to Cassell & Co., Ld., for permission to quote from The Life of Daniel O'Connell, by MacDonagh, to Mr. T. Fisher Unwin for permission to quote from A Life Spent for Ireland, to Mr. Peter Rayleigh for permission to quote from his History of Ye Antient Society of Cogers, and to Mr. Daniel O'Connell of Darrynane, and many friends for valuable information and assistance.
EARLY LIFE
SKETCH OF THE LIFE OF DANIEL O'CONNELL UP TO THE DATE OF THE COMMENCEMENT OF HIS JOURNAL.
Birth and Parentage.
Daniel O'Connell was born on August 6th, 1775, and was therefore in his one-and-twentieth year when the first entry in his Journal was made. He was the eldest son of Morgan O'Connell, of Carhen, in the county of Clare, a gentleman farmer, and Catherine O'Mullane, of Whitechurch, county Clare. The other sons were Maurice, John, and James, the last mentioned of whom was created a baronet in 1869. His parents were married in April, 1771, in the Protestant church of the Holy Trinity, Cork.^ The licence granted by the Protestant bishop is dated April i6th, 1771, and is preserved in the Record Office, Dublin, where it was discovered by Mr. Valentine Coppinger, an Irish barrister. All Catholics who expected to inherit landed property took out these Protestant licences, but were married by their own priests.^ Why the marriage of
^ Life of Daniel O'Connell, by MacDonagh, p. 4. 2 The Last Colonel of the Irish Brigade, by Mrs. Morgan John O'Connell, vol. i. p. 158.
2 DANIEL O'CONNELL
O'Connell's father and mother should have been solemnized in a Protestant place of worship, as well as by a clergyman of their own Church, which no doubt it was, it is not easy to understand. But the object may have been to avoid the risk occasioned by the Irish statute 19 Geo. III. c. ig, which enacted that every marriage celebrated by a popish priest between a Papist and a person that had been, or had professed to be, a Protestant, at any time within twelve months of such celebration, should be null and void.
The great Tribune came of an ancient stock. There is said to be in the British Museum an original manuscript in Irish — though the Editor has not been able to trace it — which records that in the year 1245 a Daniel O'Connell advanced, at the head of a considerable body of men, to the north of Ireland, to repel the incursions of an invading force from the land of Morven, supposed to be Scotland; that he defeated the invaders, and having become on friendly terms with them, fell in love with one of their people, a beautiful maiden, named Agandecca; that, her affections having been already bestowed, she repelled his advances, and that he resolved to carry her off, but was foiled by her flight into her own country, where he did not think it prudent to pursue her.^
^ Memoirs, Private and Political, of Daniel O'Connell, by Huish, p. 8. See below, n. w, p. 131.
4V ',, ■Mt'iUi
Sir^'^Uiyi'^ *i/^ -rsVi^tamtmSmf^-tif*-
2 DANTT^L (TCONN'ELL
O'Connell's fath<;r ana snouid have been
solemnized in a Protesta... y,..^c of worship, as well A% by a clergyman of their own Church, which no doubt ifc was, it is not easy to understand. But the object may have been to avoid the risk occasioned by the Irish statute ig Geo. III. c. 19, which enacted that every marriage celebrated by a popish priest between a Papist and a person that had been, or had professed to be, a Protestant, at any time within twelve months of such celebration, should be null and void.
The ^eat Tribune came of an ancient stock.
There is said to be in the British Museum an
original manuscript in Irish — though the Editor
has not been able to trace it — which records that
m the year 1245 a Daniel O'Connell advanced,
,it the head of a considerable body of men, to
the north of Ireland, to repel the incursions of an
invading force from the land of Morven, supposed
io he Scotland; that he. defeated the invaders,
;n,l hiv'ing become on friendly terms with them,
U!\'t with one of their people, a beautiful
: trTicd Agandecca; that, her aifections
. .n already bestowed, she repelled his
s; and that he resolved to carry her off,
ioiieJ by her flight into her own country,
ht: ^id not thnik it prudent to pursue her.*
• :- •'< ^«-. f- :.(i-^s V ' yCoimell, by Huish,
i • ^ n. ♦«. p. i J!.
yttprojucecf 6y permission. ^ojn cin tcnpui/isAee/ pjc^zzre r'n lAe poss^^^ron o/^ Sr'ry^oraan Xoss O'ConneU.^Saj-t.oflaJxVimtGi./i^enyr.
EARLY LIFE 3
The names Morven and Agandecca appear in Macpherson's Ossian. The name O'Connell, or rather O'Conal, appears in a commission issued by- Edward in. in 1337 to Hugh O'Conal to reduce some refractory tribes in Limerick. It recurs in pubHc records in the years 1372, 1421, and 1490. One of the family, named Maurice, took up arms in defence of the pretender Perkin Warbeck, but was pardoned in 1496. A Morgan O'Conal undertook to pay a rent of twenty pence Irish to Henry VIII. as a recognition of his authority, and was High Sheriff of Kerry in the following reign. His son Rickard served in the army of Queen Elizabeth against the rebels of Desmond. One of the family, named Daniel, of Ahavore, held, aloof from the rebellion of 1641, and so saved his property in Iveragh.^
An ancestor of the Liberator fought at the head of a regiment for James II., a fact to which he referred in his speech in the House of Commons made on July 31st, 1840, in support of the Melbourne Ministry.
The O'Connells were originally settled in Limerick, but were compelled to retreat to I veragh, in the county of Kerry. On December 14th, 1653, an ancestor of the Liberator, Maurice, of Caherbearnagh, was trans- planted by Cromwell in extreme old age. He died on the way, but his family proceeded into exile, with their
^ Life and Times of Daniel O'Connell, by O' Flanagan, vol. i. pp. 14, 15 ; Burke's Landed Gentry,
4 DANIEL O'CONNELL
servants, flocks, and herds, and settled in a district called Briantree, or Brentree, near Lisdoonvarna, in the county of Clare/ A descendant of this Maurice known as Donal Mor, or Big Daniel, of Darrynane, married Mary O'Donoghue, known as Maur-ni- Dhuiv, or Mary of the Dark Folk, granddaughter, or at any rate a blood relation, of Donal Mahony, of Dunloe, whom Froude {English in Ireland, vol. i. p. 452) refers to as the terrible Papist that ruled South Kerry with his four thousand followers.^ Donal Mor it was who in 1740 built that house at Darrynane ^ which was destined to become a
^ The Last Colonel of the Irish Brigade, vol. i. p. 2 ; vol. ii. p. 312. Fifty-nine persons are said to have accompanied Maurice. He is buried in a rude tomb, bearing, in Irish, the inscription, " The burial tomb of the O'Connells, lords of Braintree. Pray for Raghnall, the Brave O'Connell" {ih. vol. ii. p. 18). According to Burke {Landed Gentry) this branch became extinct in 1749 on the death of Rickard O'Connell, of Brentree. He traces the descent of Daniel O'Connell to John O'Connell, of Ahavore and Darrynane, father of Daniel, who married Maur-ni-Dhuiv.
2 The Last Colonel of the Irish Brigade, vol. i. pp. 7, 51 ; vol. ii. p. 203.
3 The etymology of this word is debatable. O'Connell derived it from the two Irish words darragh, an oak, and inane, ivy — the Ivied Oaks (Personal Recollections, i. 168). O' Flanagan disputes this derivation, and suggests that it comes from words which signify a solitary oak forest (Life and Times of Daniel O'Connell, i. 4, note). Mrs. Morgan John O'Connell thinks it means St. Finan's Oak Wood {The Last Colonel of the Irish Brigade, i. 5). Fitzpatrick says " Darrinane, the Oak Grove of Finan, whose ancient church is shown a few miles
EARLY LIFE 5
historical edifice. Of the union of Donal Mor and Maur-ni-Dhuiv there were issue twenty-two children, twelve of whom, four sons and eight daughters, grew up. John, the eldest of the sons, died in youth. The second of them, Maurice, was familiarly known as Hunting-cap, "Murrish-a-Cauppeen," from the velvet headgear which, after a tax had been put upon beaver hats, he invariably wore. Mrs. Morgan John O'Connell, in the Preface to her interesting Life of Genet al Count O'Connell^ gives the following graphic account of Hunting-cap: — " His" — Count O'Connell's — "brother Maurice, witty, wealthy, and wise, was a remarkable man in his own way. He lived in seeming seclusion and voluntary obscurity, yet amassed a great fortune in spite of the anti-Popery laws, and carried on a most interesting political correspondence with the leading Protestants of his county. We find him about to be tried for his life in 1782, and appointed a deputy governor for Kerry a few years later."^ He
from the O'Connell residence" {Correspondence of Daniel O'Connell, p. 3). The word comes apparently from Doire Fhionain, the " Fh " being silent.
^ The Last Colonel of the Irish Brigade, vol. i. p. viii. The obscurity in which the wild and remote region of Kerry was at this time wrapped was very favourable to the acquisition of property by Catholics living there. Its effect in this direction will appear from an extract from a Kerry paper accounting for the omission of the O'Connells from Smith's History of Kerry, quoted by O' Flanagan [Life and Times of Daniel O'Connell, p. 3). Smith was hospitably entertained by O'Connell's grandfather,
6 DANIEL O'CONNELL
married, but had no children, and watched over the fortunes of his nephews, of whom the illustrious Daniel was one. Many references will be made to him in the course of this sketch, as he had a great influence on the career of the subject of it.
The third of the sons of Donal Mor and Maur- ni-Dhuiv who reached man's estate was Morgan, the father of Daniel O'Connell.
The fourth was General Count O'Connell, whose name is also closely associated with the career of the Liberator. He entered the service of France in 1 76 1, being then in his sixteenth year. Four of his cousins sailed from Darrynane harbour in the same ship that, if we are to believe the poem from which an extract is given below, bore away eighteen Irish recruits for the French army. Maur-ni-Dhuiv, a woman of great talent, reckoned among her gifts that of song, and one of her efforts was a lament composed on the departure of the vessel which
who gave him valuable information about the county. Smith offered to insert in his history a tribute to the virtues and heroism of the clan Connell. The offer was declined. His host made answer, " We have peace and comfort here, Mr. Smith. We love the faith of our fathers, and amidst the seclusion of these glens enjoy a respite from persecution. If man is against us God is for us. He gives us wherewithal to pay for the education of our children in foreign lands, and enough to assist their advancement in the Irish Brigade ; but if you mention me or mine the solitude of the sea-shore will no longer be our security. The Sassenach will scale the moun- tains of Darrynane, and we shall be driven upon the world without house or home."
EARLY LIFE 7
conveyed her son to the scene of his future dis- tinctions. It was written in Irish. The following lines, from a translation made by Father Charles O'Connor, Kerry, will enable the reader to under- stand the feelings with which the exiled Celt and the kinsfolk he left behind regarded the race by which they were ruled : —
*' To your bark, brave boys, haste !
In our haven's deep strait is a sail ; On through the shallows and o'er the watery waste
For France, with my blessing on the gale ! To the land of the lily bear the shamrock of our isle ;
May they bloom above the blood-stained rose ! Ye are safe upon the wide sea : the cruiser lags a mile ; God be praised ! ye have baffled your foes. * * * * *
" My sons and my nephews, we are one ;
One red stream is flowing in our veins : My blessing, then, will follow with the radiant sun.
And my fervent prayers when dark night reigns. Ye go your ways. A greater chief from me shall yet be bom
To triumph over ocean's haughty lord. Remember in your hearts the Sassenach's foul scorn ;
In his breast find a sheath for your sword."^
The "greater chief" was indeed born. He triumphed over " ocean's haughty lord." But it was a peaceful triumph, won, not by finding in his breast a sheath for the sword, but by planting there some small sense of the injustice which drove the flower of the Irish race into the service of his
'' The Last Colonel of the Irish Brigade, i. 68. D.C. C
8 DANIEL O'CONNELL
bitterest foe. The "greater chief" was essentially a man of peace, a friend of law and order, a lover of justice, passionately devoted to liberty, as even the fragmentary Journal that he kept as a record of his actions and his opinions will testify. By his energy and his eloquence, gifts which he inherited from Maur-ni-Dhuiv, he secured for Catholics on both sides of the Irish Sea that religious equality which had been denied them for three dark centuries.
Count O'Connell was first attached to the regiment of the Royal Swedes ; but in October, 1769, he entered the Irish Brigade, then com- manded by Colonel Meade, and afterwards, in 1775, incorporated with the Irish infantry regiment of Berwick. He subsequently went back to the Royal Swedes as lieutenant - colonel. The foreign regiments in the French service were disbanded about 1791. The Count joined the Royalist forces, escaped to England in 1792, and engaged in the formation of the (English) Irish Brigade, which took service in the West Indies.^
Infancy and Childhood,
Daniel O'Connell is said to have been born in the hut of a ferryman, his mother having been taken suddenly ill on hearing of the tragic death of a near
^ The Last Colonel of the Irish Brigade, i. pp. 72, 148 ; ii. 97, 107, 142.
EARLY LIFE g
relative.^ But he gave a different account to O'Neill Daunt: " O'Connell and I were standing on the high grounds at Hillgrove which overlook his birthplace. Carhen House, where his father lived, is now in ruins. He pointed to the crumbling walls, and said, ' I was born there, but not in the house whose ruins you see. I was born in a house of which there is now no vestige, and of which the materials were used in constructing the house now dilapidated.' " ^
O'Connell was sent to nurse to the wife of his father's herdsman, who lived in a cabin on the Iveragh mountains, and remained until he was in his fourth year.^
O'Connell's earliest recollection was of an inci- dent that occurred in 1778, when he was only three years old. The celebrated Paul Jones having got the command of three French vessels of war to cruise in the Irish seas and the English Channel, arrived off the headlands of Kerry, where he was becalmed. The tide was running strongly between the Skelligs rocks and Valentia harbour, and his ships were in so dangerous a position that boats were sent ahead to tow them out to sea. A breeze sprang up, and signals were made for the boats to
^ MacDonagh, Life of O'Connell, p. 4.
2 Personal Recollections, vol. ii. p. 118. O'Connell's parents lived for a short time after their marriage at Darrynane {Last Colonel of the Irish Brigade, ii. 161).
2 MacDonagh, Life of Daniel O'Connell, p. 8.
C 2
lo DANIEL O'CONNELL
cast off and come alongside. His vessels were partially manned, however, by English and Irish sailors who had been taken prisoners, and had either been compelled to serve, or had elected to do so in order to escape the horrors of their prison at Brest. Two of the boats' crews, consisting of some of these prisoners, disregarded the signals and pulled for shore. They reached Valentia harbour, and were hospitably entertained by a gentleman of the neighbourhood, who, however, sent to Tralee, and obtained a military guard, to whom he delivered them up. O'Connell was taken in his nurse's arms to see them marched away from Tralee. One of them made a great impression on him. This man, who seemed, as O'Connell put it, to be " the lawyer of the party," declaimed loudly, from the back of the grey nag he was riding, against the injustice done him and his shipmates.^
MacDonagh relates two incidents that occurred in the infancy of O'Connell. " Just before he left the dwelling of the herdsman a wedding took place there. It was attended by a crowd of the neighbours, with the usual drinking and merrymaking. He returned to Carhen a precocious and observant child, and noticing how frequently parties assembled under its hospitable roof for dinner or dance, he asked his mother in Irish, ' Is there a wedding here every night ? ' On another occasion his father inquired
^ Life and Speeches of Daniel O'Connell, by John O'Connell, p. 4.
EARLY LIFE ii
of the child whether he had ever fresh mutton for dinner at Teiromoile, the place where he had been nursed. ' Yes,' he replied. ' Where did you get it ? ' asked his father. ' Oh,' said the child, who still regarded the kind folk in the herdsman's hut as his real parents, ' my dad brought in one of Morgan O'Connell's sheep, and killed it.' The father laughed heartily. ' I now know/ said he, * the fate of my missing sheep.' " ^
Irish was naturally what one may call his foster- mother tongue, and he spoke it fluently enough to address public meetings in that language.^ But he did not regret its gradual disuse among the peasantry. " I am sufficiently utilitarian," he said in a conversation at Sir Edward (then Mr.) Bulwer's house, " not to regret its abandonment. A diversity of tongues is no benefit ; it was first imposed on mankind as a curse at the building of Babel. It would be of vast advantage to mankind if all the inhabitants of the earth spoke the same language. Therefore, though the Irish language is connected with many recollections that twine round the hearts of Irishmen, yet the superior utility of the English tongue, as the medium of all modern communica- tion, is so great that I can witness without a sigh the gradual disuse of the Irish." ^
O'Connell was from his childhood a studious boy. It is told of him that, at the age of four, he learned
^ MacDonagh, Life of Daniel O'Connell, p. 8. 2 Personal Recollections, i. 15.
12 DANIEL O'CONNELL
his letters from David Mahony, one of those itinerant teachers known as " hedge-school masters," who, in the time of the penal laws, went from place to place instructing the Catholic peasantry, and often their betters, in Latin and mathematics, as well as other branches of learning. Dr. Smith, the historian of Kerry, who visited Darrynane in 1751, says of the inhabitants of that county, " The common people are extremely hospitable and courteous to strangers. Many of them speak Latin fluently, and I accidentally arrived at a little hut, in a very obscure part of this country, where I saw some poor lads reading Homer, their master having been a mendicant scholar at an English grammar school at Tralee." ^ Education seems to have been cheap in those days in Ireland. Among the items in the account book of John O'Connell, Daniel O'Connell's uncle, is the following : — " Paid Jasper Lisk, the schoolmaster, for teaching my boy to read, write, and siffre, for a twelvemonth, 15. id:' 2
Curious to relate, the hedge-school still survives in Ireland. Mr. Dalton, one of the inspectors of national schools, in his report printed in the appendix to the last report of the Commissioners of National Education in Ireland, writes, —
" I know of only one locality in the circuit to which the national school system has not yet penetrated;
1 The Last Colonel of the Irish Brigade, i. 4.
2 Jb. 23.
EARLY LIFE 13
and an application for a building grant in this case was reported on by me during the year. The place is a remote but thickly populated district in the county Clare. It is a peninsular ridge of land running out into the waters of the Shannon ; and the people — half cotters, half fishermen — are cut off a good deal from intercourse with the world around. A hedge-school of the primitive type has been in existence here for, perhaps, a century or more. I visited this institution last year ; and I was much interested, and not a little surprised, to find upwards of thirty boys and girls, assembled under the roof of a little hut, receiving a rudimentary education after a fashion that, I should have imagined, had become obsolete even in the time of their grand- parents. Why it is that this survival of the hedge- school days has held its ground so long before the march of the national school system I cannot explain ; but I could not help feeling that a peculiar and a pathetic interest now attaches to it — an interest recalling the educational and social con- ditions of a period of the country's history that has left depressing memories behind, and blended also with something of the curiosity excited by the discovery of an individual specimen of a living organism after the species had been believed to be extinct."
The first tutor of the Liberator took the curly- headed blue-eyed boy upon his knee, and combed his tangled locks, with so much more gentleness
14 DANIEL O'CONNELL
than the Httle fellow had been accustomed to when that operation was performed, that he gained the child's confidence and secured his attention while he imparted his first lesson.^ This was no doubt the occasion upon which O'Connell was taught the alphabet. " I learned the alphabet in an hour. I was in my childhood remarkably quick and per- severing. My childish propensity to idleness was overcome by the fear of disgrace. I desired to excel, and could not brook the idea of being inferior to others."'
As early as the age of nine O'Connell preferred reading to play. The first book he ever read was Captain Cook's Voyages round the World. " I read it," he told O'Neill Daunt, "with intense avidity. When the other children would ask me to play with them I used to run away and take my book to the window that is now converted into a press in the house- keeper's room at Darrynane. There I used to sit with my legs crossed, tailor-like, devouring the adventures of Cook. His book helped to make me a good geographer. I took an interest in tracing his voyages on the map. That was in 1784. I do not think I ever met a book that took a greater grasp of me. There I used to sit reading it, some- times crying over it, whilst the other children were playing."^ According to Hamilton, he composed a
^ Life and Speeches of Daniel O' Connelly p. 6.
2 Personal Recollections, i. 116.
3 Ih. ii. 78.
EARLY LIFE 15
drama on the fortunes of the house of Stuart at ten years of age.^
O'Connell at the age of nine was not only studious, but ambitious, as will appear from the following incident, which occurred at that early period of his life. A party of friends were one day assembled round his father's table, when the conversation turned on the merits of the leading statesmen of the day : Flood, and Grattan, and Charlemont. The services and eloquence of Grattan became the subject of discussion. As the guests were pretty equally divided on this, a warm debate ensued, during which O'Connell was observed sitting dreamily in an arm-chair, lost in thought. The unwonted gravity of the child's countenance, his abstracted air, attracted the attention of a lady, who said to him suddenly, "What ails you, Dan? What are you thinking of? " He turned, and looking at her, said, " I'll make a stir in the world yet." ^ He said to O'Neill Daunt, "When walking through the streets, soon after some meeting at which I had attracted public notice, I saw a magazine in a window con- taining a portrait of Counsellor O'Connell. I said to myself with a smile, ' Here are my boyish dreams of glory realised.' I need not tell you that in 1810 I had long outgrown that species of ambition." ^
^ Hamilton, Life of O'Connell, p. 3.
2 O'Flanagan, Life and Times of O'Connell, i. 27 ; Cusack, The Liberator : his Life and Times, 43.
3 Personal Recollections, i. loi.
i6 DANIEL O'CONNELL
But, indeed, before he was nine years old, when he was seven — "yes," as he tells us, "as long as I could recollect — I always felt a presentiment that I should write my name on the page of history." "I hated," he says, " Saxon domination; I detested the tyrants of Ireland."^ It was the example of his uncle. General Count O'Connell, who left Ireland at the age of fifteen and rose rapidly, that inspired him with an ambition to distinguish himself; but he always had one object in his ambitious views, and that was to do something for Ireland.^
In 1785, when less than ten years old, he was witness to a scene of sustained and systematic drunkenness that made a deep impression on his mind. He was staying at the house of a friend near the seaside. A sloop came in the whole crew of which got drunk every night, Monday night on wine, Tuesday night on punch, Wednesday night on wine, Thursday night on punch, and so on, the only variety consisting in the alternation.^
When he was a child, his father had a narrow escape of being murdered. A gang of cow-stealers, called Crelaghs, that used to steal cows in Galway
^ Personal Recollections, i. 48.
2 lb. ii. 119. O'Connell, when speaking to Daunt on this subject, stated that his uncle left Ireland at the age of fourteen. But this was a mistake. He was born in 1745, and sailed in 1761, before he was sixteen. He got his commission in the spring of the latter year (Last Colonel of the Irish Brigade, ii. 67).
* Personal Recollections, i. 155.
EARLY LIFE 17
and Clare and sell them in Kerry, and vice versa, stole fourteen cows belonging to O'Connell's father, who at once collected a body of men and surrounded the hut, in the mountains of Glencara, where they lived. After a desperate struggle, two of the marauders were captured, but the others escaped and continued their depredations. These resolved to avenge themselves on the captor of their comrades. When he was riding out one day he was apprised of their design, and warned to go by a different road from that which he was pursuing. He did so, but encountered the ruffians, who rushed down the hill and fired at him, but missed. The mare he was riding threw him, and the robbers again fired at him when he was on the ground, but again without effect. He mounted and rode off amid a fusillade, escaping unhurt. These mis- creants were screened by the Protestant gentry, " colonels," as they were styled, who alone had the privilege of sitting on the magisterial bench, and were bribed by the Crelaghs. Fortunately, however, they committed the mistake of robbing a Protestant gentleman on the high-road. He promptly got himself made a magistrate, and brought the band to justice ; the cattle of the Catholic gentry no longer became the prey of thieves, or helped to swell the incomes of their Protestant neighbours.^
* Personal Recollections, i.
i8 DANIEL O'CONNELL
Boyhood.
Much is not known of O'Connell's early boyhood. In 1787, at twelve years of age, he was brought to the assizes at Tralee. Assizes were then, he said, a great mart for all kinds of amusement, and he was greatly taken with the ballad singers. " I liked ballads above all things when I was a boy. It was then I heard two ballad singers, a man and a woman, chanting out a ballad which contained a verse I still remember : —
" * I leaned my back against an oak ; I thought it was a trusty tree : But first it bent, and then it broke ; 'Twas thus my love deserted me.'
He sang the first two lines ; she sang the third line ; both together sang the fourth line, and so on through the whole ballad."^ The Irish ballad singers to this day follow the same practice.
O'Connell told Daunt with great glee an amus- ing incident that occurred when he was a boy, during one of his visits to his uncle at Darrynane.
The hospitality of Hunting-cap was extended to Protestants and Catholics indifferently, and during
^ Personal Recollections, i. 135. The lines are taken from a Scottish ballad : —
" O waly, waly, up the bank, And waly, waly, down the brae ' '
(Cusack, The Liberator : his Life and Times, p. 41, n.).
EARLY LIFE ig
one of O'Connell's sojourns at Darrynane, while he was a boy, two Protestant gentlemen were on a visit there. On Sunday they were reduced to the alternative of going to mass or doing without public worship, as there was no Protestant church near. They chose to go to mass, and on entering the chapel they fastidiously avoided the holy water which the clerk was sprinkling copiously on all sides. The clerk observed this, and feeling his own dignity, and that of the holy water, com- promised by their Protestant squeamishness, he quietly watched them after service, and planting himself behind the sanctuary door, through which they had to pass, he suddenly splashed the entire contents of his full-charged brush into their faces. " I thought," said O'Connell to O'Neill Daunt when telling this anecdote, " I should have choked with laughing. You cannot conceive anything more ludicrous than the discomfited look the fellows had." And his fancy was so tickled with the recollection that he chuckled over it.^
It appears from an entry in the Journal under date December 31st, 1796, that O'Connell was at a school where a person named Linahan was a master, and O'Neill Daunt tells the following story, which dis- closes the name of another person who was concerned in his education, but does not seem to have made as favourable an impression on him as the poor hedge-
1 Personal Recollections, i. 48.
20 DANIEL O'CONNELL
school master. When O'Connell was about sixteen years of age, he joined a party headed by Marcus SulHvan (his cousin, mentioned in the Journal under date December 31st, 1796), of which a school- master named John Burke was one, formed to attack a herd of bulls that ranged the island of Deenish — which lies off the coast of Kerry, about five miles from Darrynane Bay — and generally resisted all attempts made by people to land. The battle raged with varying success. The bulls were ultimately defeated, but largely because they fought among themselves and killed each other. When their number had been reduced to six, Marcus Sullivan fired at the largest of the survivors. The ball, grazing his shoulder and tearing the flesh upwards, did not kill the brute, but rendered him furious. He rushed at Marcus, who could only save himself by flinging his person over a high rock that overhung the sea, to which he clung by holding on to the long grass which grew in the crevices. The bull dashed headlong over the precipice, clearing Marcus in his descent, and was killed by his fall upon the rock some hundreds of feet beneath. There were then only five bulls. Burke presented his piece at one of them, but the bull came on with a rush, and Burke, in his panic, did not fire, but fled for safety to a crevice where the bull could not follow him. O'Connell, in narrating this incident to O'Neill Daunt, remarked, " We youngsters, who had often been pestered with
EARLY LIFE 21
Mr. Burke's teachings, were sorry the bothering schoolmaster was not killed."^ Mr. Burke appears to have been a private tutor who taught O'Connell at home.^
O'Connell himself had an opportunity of realising the feelings of a person who, like the "bothering schoolmaster," had to face an angry bull. " Walking from Hillgrove to Cahirciveen," writes O'Neill Daunt, " O'Connell said, ' Do you see that large stone in yonder field ? It was the scene of an encounter I had with a bull when I was a lad. He ran after me, and my retreat was cut off by a high ditch, so I faced about and threw a stone at his forehead that stunned him. That gave me time before he recovered himself; and in the mean- time a number of boys came to my assistance, and stoned him out of the field.' " ^
An incident in O'Connell's life at this period throws a curious light upon the manners and customs of the Irish bankers and their clerks at that day. " I recollect," he told Daunt, ** when I was a younker, my uncle gave me ;f 300 in gold to get changed into notes in Cotter and Kellet's Bank.
^ Memoirs of O'Neill Daunt, p. 205. O'Connell could hardly have been about sixteen when this occurrence took place. As he was born in August, 1775, he was fifteen in 1790, in which year he was sent to Harrington's, and remained there till he went to St. Omer's. Sixteen is the age mentioned by O'Connell himself.
^ Hamilton, Life of O'Connell, p. 3.
^ Personal Recollections, ii. 120.
22 DANIEL O'CONNELL
The clerk, through stupidity, gave me ;;f40o, of which ;f300 were in small notes, and the rest in a £ioo note. I pointed out his blunder, and he in a very surly manner, and without looking at the heap of notes, insisted that I must be wrong, for that he never mistook. I persisted. He was sulky and obstinate. At last our altercation arrested the attention of Cotter, who came over and asked what was the matter. I told him I had got ;f loo too much. He reckoned the money, and then took off the ;f loo note, saying ' now it was all right. I begged he would allow me to retain that note, as my uncle was desirous to get the largest notes he could ; and I assure you it was with no trifling difficulty I could prevail on the old gentleman to take his hundred pounds in small notes." ^
One more incident in O'Connell's life, only a trifling one indeed, remains to be told before coming to the time when his systematic education began. Some private theatricals were performed at Tralee in which O'Connell acted. Among the performers was a young gentleman named Hickson, whose part consisted of the words, *' Put the horses to the coach." It was difficult for him to make a mistake, but he did ; for when his turn came he exclaimed, to the intense amusement of O'Connell, " Put the horses into the coach."
The surroundings in which O'Connell was born
' Personal Recollections, ii. 40.
EARLY LIFE 23
and reared had a profound influence upon his cha- racter. Darrynane, where he spent much of his time in boyhood, and to which he loved to retire for rest and recreation amid the cares and anxieties of later life, lies in the midst of wild and romantic scenery. " The dwelling-house," says O'Neill Daunt,^ " is situated within a few hundred yards of a little bay, which is separated from the harbour of Ballinskelligs by a rocky promontory called the Abbey Island. This promontory is sometimes insulated in particularly high tides. It contains the ruins of an ancient abbey, amongst which are the graves of the O'Connell family.
*' Much of the adjacent coast appears to have been upheaved in some desperate agony of nature. It consists of patches of unprofitable boggy surface, alternating with debris of native rock. But there are some grand and romantic scenes among the hills and on the cliffs.
" The house is sheltered on the north and west by mountains ranging from 1,500 to 2,000 feet in height. On the east the view is bounded by a chain of high rocks that divide the bay of Darrynane from that of Kenmare. Close to the house is a thriving plantation called the shrubbery, covering some ten or twelve acres of most rocky and irregular tract, through the irregularities of which there are many pretty winding walks. In the midst of this shrubbery, perched high aloft upon an ivied rock, is
^ Personal Recollections , i. 159. D.C. D
24 DANIEL O'CONNELL
a small circular turret, commanding over the tops of the young trees a view of the ocean and the neighbouring hills. To this turret Mr. O'Connell frequently retired to cogitate in solitude over his future political movements. He had also a favourite walk in the garden, which is picturesquely situated amongst rocks, and contains some of the finest hollies I have ever seen.
" Darrynane contains tolerable accommodation, although it often proved scarcely sufficient for the numbers attracted by the hospitable habits and political celebrity of the owner. It was built at different periods, and without the slightest regard to any uniform plan of architecture. A room was added whenever there arose a demand for increased accommodation, so that the whole mass presents a curious cluster of small buildings of different dates, heights, and sizes. In the dining-room are portraits of Mr. O'Connell, his lady, and his children. The portrait of the Liberator, although an indifferent painting, is, I understand, the very best likeness ever taken of him."
A memento of the old evil days was preserved at Darrynane in the shape of a piece of the skull of a friar hewn down with the sword while saying mass by a soldier of Cromwell. This relic had early made a deep impression on O'Connell, whose eye had often been fixed upon it.^ In after years he had it buried in the Abbey.
^ O'FIanagan, Life and Times of O'Connell, i. 27.
EARLY LIFE 25
In October, 1838, O'Connell wrote to Walter Savage Landor from Darrynane, " Little do you imagine how many persons besides myself have been delighted with the poetic imaginings which inspired those lines on one of the wonders of my infancy : the varying sound emitted by marine shells : —
[Shake me, and it awakens ; then apply
Its poHsht lips to your attentive ear ;]
* And it remembers its august abode,
And murmurs as the ocean murmurs there.' "
The third and fourth lines only were quoted by O'Connell ; but we have taken the liberty of insert- ing the two that preceded them. The letter goes on, " Were you with me amidst the Alpine scenery surrounding my humble abode, listening to the eternal roar of the mountain torrent as it bounds through the rocky defiles of my native glens, I would venture to tell you how I was born within the sound of the everlasting wave, and how my dreamy boyhood dwelt upon imaginary intercourse with those who were dead of yore, and fed its fond fancies upon the ancient and long-faded glories of that land which preserved Christianity when the rest of now civilised Europe was shrouded in the darkness of godless ignorance. Yes, my expand- ing spirit delighted in these day-dreams, till, catching from them an enthusiasm which no disappointment can embitter, nor accumulating years diminish, I formed the high resolve to leave my native land
D 2
26 DANIEL O'CONNELL
better after my death than I found her at my birth, and if possible to make her what she ought to be, —
* Great, glorious, and free, First flower of the earth and first gem of the sea.'
Perhaps if I could show you the calm and exquisite beauty of these capacious bays and moun- tain promontories, softened in the pale moonlight which shines this lovely evening, till all which during the day was grand and terrific has become calm and serene in the silent tranquillity of the clear night — perhaps you would readily admit that the man who has been so often called a ferocious demagogue is in truth a gentle lover of Nature, an enthusiast of all her beauties,
' Fond of each gentle and each dreary scene,'
and catching from the loveliness as well as from the dreariness of the ocean, and the Alpine scenes with which it is surrounded, a greater ardour to promote the good of man in his overwhelming admiration of the mighty works of God."
This " high resolve," formed in his " dreamy boyhood," lived through his youth, as many a passage in the Journal testifies, and was the main- spring of his actions during a manhood character- ised by the most unselfish devotion to Ireland.
Count O'Connell, who did not marry till late in life, and never had any children, took a great interest in his relatives, and especially in his nephews,
EARLY LIFE 27
several of whom he succeeded in establishing advantageously abroad, after having in many instances obtained for them bourses in those educa- tional institutions in connection with which rich members of the old Irish Catholic families had founded bourses for the benefit of the sons of those who were not wealthy enough to provide a Con- tinental education for them. Among those in whom the Count took a particular interest were the sons of his brother Morgan. While they were yet but children, he writes to Hunting-cap on April i6th, 1783,^ "Pray, how old are Morgan's sons? Are they stout and promising?" He was at that time constantly on the look-out among his own people for recruits for the Brigade who in figure and in intelligence would be worthy of commissions in its regiments, and later he was planning, moreover, getting one of Morgan's sons into the French navy, for he writes on October 23rd, 1787, " From the late changes which have taken place in our Ministry, it becomes uncertain whether I shall be able to effectuate my expectation of placing brother Morgan's son in the navy ; but on the arrival ot the new Minister of that department I shall see what's to be done in that line, and let you know the measures to be taken." ^ This project appears to have failed, or at all events to have been abandoned for the alternative plan of putting John into the
^ The Last Colonel of the Irish Brigade, ii. 9. 2 Ih. 55.
28 DANIEL O'CONNELL
French army. But from this course the Count dis- suaded his brother in a letter of May 28th, 1788, in which he writes, " With regard to our nephew John, the son of our brother Morgan, my desire is that you apply him to some other course of life than mine. Some late changes in the military constitu- tion of this country are [so] exceedingly unfavourable to strangers destitute of fortune, that it's destining them to certain misery to send them over. ... I therefore earnestly recommend you to look out for another course of life for your nephews, for, was I to begin the world over again, I should never engage in the military service in the present state of things." ^ This advice seems to have been followed, for, as will be seen hereafter, Daniel and Maurice were destined for the legal profession, and Hunting-cap determined to send them abroad for a year and a half to be educated. Accordingly he consulted Count O'Connell as to the best place to send them. The Count wrote on June i6th, 1789, that he had made all possible inquiries, and concluded that " the college of St. Omer's is the most suitable." He then adds, "I cu'd wish to know their age exactly, and shall only make one observation, viz., that colledge education has the sole advantage of pushing youth to the study of belles lettres by giving them a knowledge of the Greek and Latin tongues, a tincture of mathematicks, logic,
1 The Last Colonel of the Irish Brigade, ii. 70.
EARLY LIFE 29
and philosophy, and that one year and a half are far from being sufficient for that purpose, and that if your object is to give your nephews a polite literary education, so as to qualify them to appear in the world with some advantage, that purpose can be fulfilled only by resorting to good company, and at no small expense in this country, and also when reason and understanding have acquired a certain degree of maturity." ^
Events were, however, moving so rapidly on the Continent at this time that the Count writes again on January 14th, 1790, " I am not of opinion that you should send our young nephews to St. Omer's until tranquillity be more solidly established than it is. I shall let you know in April or May my fixed sentiment in the matter, and if things should not bear a prospect of peace I would be very much at a loss where to send them to. . . . You see, dear brother, that it is no easy matter to determine a proper place to send two children without a governor, and I durst not advise you to dispatch them for any part of the Continent till the present clouds be dissipated."^
In consequence, no doubt, of this advice, the boys were sent in the spring of the year 1790 to the school kept by Dr. Harrington at Redington, in Long Island, near Cork, which is said to have been the first opened by a priest after the relaxation of the
^ The Last Colonel of the Irish Brigade, ii. 8o. ' lb. 34.
30 DANIEL O'CONNELL
penal code in 1782. O'Connell was, he tells us him- self, the only boy at that school that was not beaten, and that this immunity from punishment he owed to his attention. One day he was idle, and his teacher, finding him imperfect in his lesson, threatened to beat him. O'Connell shrank from the indignity, and asked his teacher not to beat him for half an hour, saying that if he had not learned his lesson by that time, he might beat him then. The respite was granted, and the lesson, rather a difficult one, was thoroughly mastered in the time.^ Christopher Pagan, the father of WiHiam Pagan, M.P., who was a schoolfellow of O'Connell's at Harrington's, and in the same class, told his son that O'Connell did not display any extraordinary precocity of intellect, and was but an ordinary scholar.^
Count O'Connell in a letter of September 2nd, 1790, repeated his warning against sending the boys abroad. "I think," he writes, ''you must lay aside all thoughts of sending our young nephews over. I know not either in Prance or the Low Countries where you can safely send them."^
Despite these warnings, however. Hunting-cap resolved to send the two brothers to be educated on the Continent by the Jesuits, who originally had a colony at St. Omer's.
^ Personal Recollections, i. 116.
2 The Life and Times of Daniel O'Connell, by William Fagan,
^ The Last Colonel of the Irish Brigade, ii. 90.
EARLY LIFE 31
In the end of the year 1790 the boys embarked at the Cove of Cork in a brig bound for London, and landed at Dover. The tide being out, they had to go ashore in a boat. It capsized in the surf, and Daniel got a ducking. '^ From Dover they took the packet to Ostend, and proceeded thence by diligence. Sitting opposite to Daniel was a Frenchman who indulged in violent abuse of England. O'Connell seemed perfectly satisfied, and the Frenchman, astonished at his apathy, after talking a long time, lost patience, and cried, " Do you hear ? Do you understand what I am saying, sir?" "Yes," replied O'Connell, " I com- prehend you perfectly." " And yet," rejoined his fellow-traveller, "you are not angry." *' Not in the least," said O'Connell. " How," asked the Frenchman, " can you so tamely bear the censures I pronounce against your country ? " " Sir," said O'Connell, " England is not my country. Censure her as much as you please ; you cannot offend me. I am an Irishman, and my countrymen have as little reason to love England as yours, perhaps less." '
A little before this time the Jesuits had removed from St. Omer's to Liege, so the boys went there from Ostend by Treykschuyt. When they arrived they found that Daniel was too old to be admitted, and they therefore retraced their steps as
^ Life and Speeches of Daniel O'Connell, p. 6. 2 Personal Recollections, ii. 26.
32 DANIEL O'CONNELL
far as Louvain, where they waited for six weeks, until fresh instructions came from home. While there they attended the university schools, and had recourse to the library of the Dominicans, to whom they had letters, and who were very civil to them, as were also the Franciscans/ Daniel O'Connell made so good a use of his opportunities that he rose to a high place in a class of one hundred and twenty students.^
The boys were directed to go to the English college at St. Omer's. This institution, of which they were destined to be among the last inmates, was founded by Philip II. in 1592, with the object of affording to English and Irish Catholics that higher education which was denied them in their native country. It boasted of many distinguished alumiii. Among them was Kirwan the traveller, who was a fellow-student of O'Connell. It was closed in 1793, and converted into a military hospital.'^
The boys travelled from Louvain to Ostend, and thence to St. Omer's by Jurens and Dunkirk. They entered the college in January, 1791. They appear to have been well taught, well fed, and well cared for. O'Connell writes to his uncle Maurice
^ See a letter from Maurice to his uncle, dated January 17th, 1791 — 1792, written from St. Omer's, which is printed in vol. x. of the Irish Monthly, and Life and Speeches of Daniel O'Connell, p. 7.
2 O'Connell et le College Anglais a Saint-Omer, par Louis Cavrois, 2nd ed. p. 69.
EARLY LIFE 33
on February 3rd that they were taught the Latin and Greek authors, French, EngHsh,and geography, besides getting lessons during recreation hours in music, dancing, fencing, and drawing. Maurice mentions in the letter above quoted that they were obliged to speak French.^ Daniel appears to have
^ Fitzpatrick, Correspondence of Daniel 0^ Connelly i. 2. See also the following letter from Maurice to his uncle of January 17th, 1792, printed in the Irish Monthly, vol. x. p. 336; —
" My dear Uncle, — I received your affectionate letter of the 22nd ult., and take the first opportunity of answering it. The letter which came to your hands last month was, I assure you, given by me to the President on the 29th or 30th of October, who said he would write some lines in the end of it, which, until I received yours, I thought he had done, and also sent you the college bill and his directions. For our college duties I refer you to the letter Dan wrote you on December 5th. When I wrote first, I was not acquainted with them. Our route from Louvain to Ostend you have seen in the directions given us in Cork. The expense was ^bout two guineas each. From Ostend we came to Jurens, from thence to Dunkirk, from thence to this town, the expense two pounds ten shillings each. We attended the university schools whilst at Louvain, and had recourse to the library of the Dominicans (to whom we had letters), who were very civil to us, as were also the Franciscans. I should have mentioned these circumstances if I had thought you would have been pleased with it. I hope you will have no cause to be offended with me for the future. I assure you, my dear uncle, the ties of gratitude, duty, and affection bind me too close to you that I should willingly give you the least pain, and I find myself very unhappy at being the cause of your past trouble. I hope our future conduct will be such as to merit your entire approbation. The hope of giving you satisfaction will be a greater induce- ment to our labouring to fulfil our college duties than the
34 DANIEL O'CONNELL
had lessons in music, for he speaks of his violin in a letter to his uncle of March 21st, 1793, referred to below. It has been frequently alleged that O'Connell had no ear for music, and could not dis- tinguish " Garryowen " from " Rule, Britannia." But if he learned the violin, an instrument that requires in the performer a perception of the most delicate gradations of sound, such is not likely to have been the case.
Daniel studied grammar and poetical composition at St. Omer's, if we are to credit M. Louis Cavrois.^
Mathematics was an extra, and cost £\2. a year to learn. In a letter of February 3rd, 1791 — 1792, O'Connell says he had received a letter from his uncle in Paris desiring them to learn mathematics, logic, and rhetoric, but had told him that if he wished them to follow that system of education it would be better to send them elsewhere. " Not that I find the smallest fault with this college, where
profit arising to ourselves thereby. We are all obliged to speak French. Our regulations are well observed, and our living sufficiently good. Give my duty to my grandmother, father, and mother, my love to my brothers and sisters and to all other friends.
" I remain, my dear Uncle,
" Your grateful and dutiful nephew, " Maurice O'Connell.
"St. Omek's, January lyth, 1792."
* " Daniel fit a Saint-Omer ses classes de grammaire et de po^sie " (p. 8).
EARLY LIFE 35
ever3^thing that is taught is sufficiently attended to, the boys taken good care of, and the Hving good enough." They had theatricals also. He writes in the same letter, " Before the places " — at exami- nation— " are read out there is a scene or two of a play acted on a small stage in the college by one of the first four schools, and of them there are eight in the year; of consequence we compose eight times. There is a whole play acted in the month of August." He adds, " As our trunk was too large to get into our dormitory, we were obliged to get a small wooden box from the Procurator, nailed against the wall of the play-yard. These are here called houses. We keep in it the books and other little things we brought with us." ^
They had, as he tells his uncle in a letter of June 30th, 1792, a country house in connection with the school, situated in a beautiful valley about a mile from the town, to which all the boys went once a fortnight, and remained a day. " This," he remarks, " renders the summer very agreeable." His school went there on July ist, 1792, and remained four days, " which are by far the pleasantest." After the preceding Easter exami- nations the boys began on a new footing. " We now read," he says in a letter of April i6th, 1792, " Mignot's harangues, Cicero, and Caesar. These are our Latin authors, though they are read over
^ Fitzpatrick, Correspondence of Daniel O'Connell, i. 2.
36 DANIEL O'CONNELL
without any study beforehand. Caesar is given chiefly to turn into Greek. Our Greek authors are Demosthenes, Homer, and Xenophon's Anabasis. Our French one is Dugaro's Speeches.^' He adds in a postscript, " Philosophy is not taught pubHcly in this college. We have had leave to eat meat during this Lent." ^
Whether O'Connell learned any mathematics while at St. Omer's is doubtful. The boys were certainly taught arithmetic, for he mentions in the letter of June 6th that he was " in interest." ^ That he was quick at figures is evident from an incident related by himself of a case in which a client of his was sued for a sum of ;f i,ioo. While his colleagues were endeavouring to get a verdict by abusing the plaintiff's attorney, he extracted from the books of the defendant figures which showed that the plain- tiff owed him £yoo, a fact of which he convinced the jury, who were much annoyed that they could not find a verdict against the plaintiff for that amount.^
O'Connell seems to have made good progress at St. Omer's. In the letter of February 3rd, 1791 — I7g2,already quoted, he tells his uncle that he had got second in Latin, Greek, and English, and eleventh in French. His study of the last-mentioned language left traces in his pronunciation, for Fagan
^ Fitzpatrick, Correspondence, i, 3.
2 Ih. 4.
2 Personal Recollections, ii. 96.
EARLY LIFE 37
mentions that he pronounced some words with a French accent, such, for example, as " empire " and " charity," and others having an affinity with their French originals. This, according to Fagan, gave a musical turn to his expressions and an interest to his tones which in after-times went far to increase the captivating effects of his eloquence. The last words he uttered in public were spoken in French. They were in reply to Count de Monta- lambert, who headed the deputation that presented O'Connell with an address from the Catholics of France when he was in Paris on his way to Rome. He spoke but briefly, for, as he said, sickness and emotion closed his mouth.^ He spoke French fluently, but he refused on one occasion to go over to conduct a case in France, on the ground of want of sufficient command of the language.
English composition does not appear to have been neglected at St. Omer's, for while there O'Connell wrote an essay upon the systems of education pursued in England and France respec- tively which was a very creditable efl"ort for a lad of his years.^ His two close - pressing rivals while at St. Omer's were the Right Rev. Dr. Walsh, afterwards Bishop of the Midland district of England, and Christopher Fagan, who became a
1 " My Father as I remember him," by Daniel O'Connell, Temple Bar, vol. cxviii. p. 221.
"^ Memoirs, Private and Political, of Daniel O'Connell, by Huish. He prints the essay in full.
38 DANIEL O'CONNELL
general in the East India Company's service and Judge-Advocate of the Indian forces.^
O'Connell did not neglect athletic exercises while he was at St. Omer's, and he appears to have inspired a wholesome dread of his prowess as a pugilist among his fellow-students. We may be sure that he never used his strength as a bully. He was assuredly the protector of the weak against the strong. An anecdote is told of him that is very significant of his courage and coolness. He inflicted bodily chastisement upon one of his fellow- students for some offence. The offender complained that the French were not in the habit of settling their differences with their fists. O'Connell inquired how they settled them, and on being told that it was with sword or pistol he went away and returned with one sword and one pistol, the choice of which he offered to his opponent, who, however, declined this rather unusual mode of duelling. But O'Connell was never afterwards provoked to a quarrel, which he would have been quite ready to settle in the fashion, whatever it might be, which his antagonist preferred.^
M. Louis Cavrois, in his O'Connell et le College Anglais a Saint-Omer (p. 82), gives an extract from Gloires Nouvelles de Catholicisme, of which the following is a translation : — " The young Daniel,
^ Life and Speeches of Daniel O'Connell, by John O'Connell,
P- 7-
2 Huish, Memoirs, Private and Political, of Daniel O'Connell.
EARLY LIFE 39
by the exceptional retentiveness of his memory, by the soHdity of his judgment, by the quickness of his intelUgence, by the wealth of his imagination, left all his fellow-students far behind, and obtained at St. Omer successes as rapid as they were astonishing. Let us add that, profoundly religious, but without fanaticism ; pious, but without hypo- crisy; lofty of character, but without pride ; strict in morals, but without austerity ; jovial, but without dissipation ; docile, but without fickleness [Jegerete^ ; firm, but without obstinacy; respectful, but without servility ; obliging, but without obsequiousness, he knew how to secure, along with the admiration, the love of everybody, so that each deemed himself happy in his friendship and honoured by his society." If this portrait is not exaggerated — and from Dr. Stapylton's estimate of O'Connell, quoted below, the boy was indeed the father of the man — it becomes easy to understand and appreciate those passages in his Journal in which he gives vent to his feelings upon the high themes of virtue, and liberty, and patriotism.
The Rev. Dr. Stapylton, afterwards Bishop and Vicar Apostolic of the Midland district ot England, was then president of the college ; and in reply to an inquiry made by their uncle Maurice in January, 1792, gave the following account of the two nephews : — " I begin with the younger, Maurice. His manner and demeanour are quite satisfactory. He is gentlemanly in his conduct, and much beloved
D.C. E
40 DANIEL O'CONNELL
by his fellow-students. He is not deficient in abilities, but he is idle and fond of amusement. I do not think he will answer for any laborious pro- fession ; but I will answer for it he will never be guilty of anything discreditable : at least, such is my firm belief. With respect to the elder, Daniel, I have but one sentence to write about him ; and that is that I never was so much mistaken in my life unless he be destined to make a remarkable figure in society."
The difference in disposition between the two brothers here indicated is shown also in the letters of Count O'Connell of December nth, 1793, and January 26th, 1794, quoted below (p. 47).
Whether it was on account of the troubled state of France at that time, or because philosophy and, perhaps, other branches of learning were not taught at St. Omer's, O'Connell, no doubt at the instance of one or other of his uncles, made inquiries about the college at Douay, for he writes in the letter of June 30th, 1792, " I have learned some other particulars relative to the College Douay since my last, which is that French is paid no great attention to there, nay almost totally neglected. Arithmetic also, it is said, will soon be entirely laid aside." ^ It was resolved that they should go to Douay, and, in accordance with a letter from their uncle Maurice, dated July 17th and received exactly a month later, the boys left St. Omer's on August i8th, 1792, for
^ Fitzpatxick, Correspondence^ i. 4.
EARLY LIFE 41
the English college at Douay, where they arrived the same day. They had brought ;^io with them to St. Omer's as pocket-money, which, as O'Connell tells his uncle Maurice in a letter of April i6th, 1792, the President gave the Procurator, to be doled out to them at the rate of sixpence a fortnight. Although this must have left a considerable balance to their credit, and although the Procurator knew that they would want no inconsiderable sum on their arrival, all he gave them for their journey to Douay was a crown apiece. They started before breakfast, and arrived penniless, to find, to their astonishment, that the only furniture in their rooms was a bed for each, as every student was supposed to bring with him money to furnish his room. They had no previous intimation that they would have to provide their own furniture, and they spent their first night at their new abode in great distress. Daniel took ill, and had to go to the infirmary ; so it was Maurice who wrote home describing the situation. A fellow-countryman named Duggan, from Newmarket, county Cork, came to their rescue. He advised them to go to the President and explain their position, which they did, with the result that he advanced them a guinea and a half, with which they bought most of the little things necessary for their rooms, such as looking-glasses, candlesticks, basins, etc. They had also to spend four shillings each on buckles, as those worn at St. Omer's were small iron ones. This exhausted the loan, but
£ 2
42 DANIEL O'CONNELL
their newly found friend forced them to accept a temporary advance of half a guinea, with which they provided themselves with knives, forks, etc., for refectory. The sums so borrowed would have enabled them to carry on till they should hear from their uncle, but meantime the Procurator, M. Baymont, sent for Daniel and told him that, as he depended on the credit his uncle Maurice had given him, he would provide them with furniture, so they got a desk, a table, " a small table for washing and pondering," and four chairs.
In a letter which is undated, but endorsed September 4th, 1792, Maurice asks for £\^ or ;f 13, requests his uncle to mention what he wished them to learn, ** as musick, etc.," and promises to send the college rules in his next.^ It appears that his uncle gave Daniel leave to learn music, for he had a violin when he was leaving Douay. As to philosophy and rhetoric, the course in those subjects had begun the previous Whitsuntide, and Daniel tells his uncle in a letter of September 14th that they had already learned the first principles of the latter, and before they got an answer from him would be able to study it privately for themselves. He points out that if they went into philosophy they would save a whole year ; that they were already studying it in their leisure hours, Mr. Duggan having got them books. He suggests therefore
' The Last Colonel of the Irish Brigade, ii. 105.
EARLY LIFE 43
that it would be better for them to go straight into philosophy than remain any longer in rhetoric, as they could get lessons wherever they studied the law, and learn more rhetoric in a month than in a whole year at Douay.^ It would appear from this letter that both the brothers were originally intended for the legal profession, a fact which shows how groundless is the idea that Daniel was intended for the Church, as many suppose, notwithstanding that O'Connell himself emphatically contradicted it in a letter to the Dublin Evening Post of July 17th, 1828.
The commissariat at Douay does not appear to have been altogether satisfactory. The pension was twenty-five guineas a year, but Daniel writes in the letter last quoted, "We get very small portions at dinner. Most of the lads (those on bourses excepted) get what they call 'seconds' — that is, a second portion every day — and for this they pay £2, or £^ a year extra ordinary. We would be much obliged to you for leave to get them, but this as you please." In another place he says, "We are obliged to pay for the washing ourselves. At St. Omer's everything was done for the boys ; here the boys are obliged to do everything for themselves." But he hastens to add, " This colledge is much better in every respect than the other."
The students at Douay were at this period apprehensive for their safety, fearing that the
^ Fitzpatrick, Correspondence, i. 5.
44 DANIEL O'CONNELL
revolutionaries would break in and massacre them ; but they seem never to have been exposed to any real danger. Once, indeed, Daniel O'Connell and some of his companions got a fright when walking for recreation. A waggoner of the army of Dumouriez espied them and shouted, "Voilales jeunes Jesuites, les Capucines, les recolets." The students fled in panic to the college, which they reached in safety without being pursued.^ It became impossible, however, for the boys to remain at Douay. On January 17th, 1793, O'Connell wrote to his uncle at Darrynane, "The present state of affairs in this country is truly alarming. The conduct the English have pursued with regard to the French in England makes us dread to be turned off every day. In case of a war with England this is almost inevi- table.'" Louis XVI. was guillotined on January 21st, 1793. The two boys quitted Douay on the same day, and journeyed to Calais. Their carriage was attacked on the way by Republicans, who reviled them, calling them " young priests " and "little aristocrats." The soldiers struck the head of the vehicle several times with their musket stocks as it was starting.^ When they arrived at Calais
^ Personal Recollections, i. 103. Dumouriez won the battle of Jemappes on November 6th, 1792. Jemappes is in Belgium, thirty-six miles from Douay.
2 Fitzpatrick, Correspondence, i. 7.
3 Macdonagh, Life of O'Connell, p. 17 ; John O'Connell, Life and speeches of Daniel O'Connell, p. 9 ; Personal Recollections, i. 103.
EARLY LIFE 45
the news came that the King had been executed. The tragic event naturally created great excitement among the passengers aboard the packet for Dover, who included the two O'Gonnells. It is said that as soon as the packet was under way Daniel plucked from his hat the tricolor cockade which he had worn for safety on his journey, and threw it into the sea, and that some fishermen reverently rescued it, cursing him the while. The horror among the passengers created by the tidings of the French king's death was deepened by an incident that occurred on the voyage. While they were discussing and denouncing the barbarous act, two gentlemen entered, and one of them mentioned that they were present at the execution, having bribed two of the National Guard to lend them their uniforms, at the same time exhibiting a handker- chief stained with the blood of the ill-fated monarch. An Englishman asked how, in Heaven's name, they could bear to witness such a hideous spectacle. The answer astounded the hearers. "For the love of the cause," was the reply. The two voluntary witnesses of the " hideous spectacle " were the brothers Sheares.^
From the Journal, entry No. 37, under date December 31st, 1796, it appears that the lads were to have gone to Ireland with Darby Mahony and
^ Personal Recollections, ii. 95. It was John Sheares, the elder of the brothers, who dipped his handkerchief in the King's blood (Fagan, Life and Times of Daniel O'Connell, p. 27).
46 DANIEL O'CONNELL
Marcus Sullivan, but that Count O'Connell inter- vened, with the result that they were sent to Pagan's, which, it is to be supposed, was the school to be mentioned presently.
Count O'Connell made his escape out of France in the middle of July, 1792, and arrived in London about the end of October. Soon after the boys left Douay the college was suppressed, and converted into a military barrack. Daniel writes to his uncle Maurice from London on March 2gth, 1793, " I send you by my uncle Dan's orders, though it is not a month since Maurice wrote, the accounts as they came from Douay. We left most of our furni- ture, together with my violin, to be sold ; but they have been seized by the municipality, as was every other article which had no particular owner then present, all such goods being considered national property. When we came to London we had every single article of wearing apparel to buy, and as things are excessively dear here, a large sum of money is soon expended." He adds in a postscript, "We are satisfied in every respect with our present situation." ^
It appears from a letter from Daniel to his uncle Maurice, dated October 21st, 1793,^ that Daniel was sent to school to a Mr. Fagan. A reference to this fact will be found in the Journal under date December 31st, 1796. He remained at Mr. Fagan's
^ Fitzpatrick, Correspondence, i. 7. 2 /J. i. 8.
EARLY LIFE 47
till a short time before this letter was written. The school was broken up owing to the paucity of pupils, Daniel and a Mr. Waters, nephew of 'Count Waters, being the only constant boarders there for some time. Daniel went to the house where Maurice had been placed. He learned logic while at this school, for he told his uncle in the same letter that Mr. Pagan thought that on the whole it would turn out much to his advantage, as he had got pretty near the end, and got over almost, if not all, its difficulties.
How the lads were getting on at this time is seen from a letter written by the Count to their uncle Maurice of December nth, 1793: "Our two nephews are well and improved in their carriage and demeanour. Dan is indeed promising in everything that is good and estimable, and I hope Maurice will conform to your commands and merit your goodness." ^
The contrast between the terms in which the Count speaks of his two nephews is significant. Maurice had evidently run counter to Hunting- cap's wishes in some way. Probably he refused to follow the law as a profession. However this may be, he was called to Darrynane. The Count writes on January 26th, 1794, " Our nephews are both well. Maurice will return home with Dan Mahony. . . . Dan shall be entered next week at the
^ The Last Colonel of the Irish Brigade, ii. 121.
48 DANIEL O'CONNELL
Temple, and remove from the present petision where he now is to a house more convenient for attending the courts. Mr. Duggan is already a boarder there, and the price is not unreasonable. I have every expectation that our nephew Dan will show himself worthy of your unequalled favours, and I likewise cherish hopes that under your own eye Maurice will acquire that steadiness and solidity of judgment suited to the situation you intend him for." ^ What this situation was can only be a matter of conjecture. Maurice wanted to be a soldier. He had his way, and perished, as recorded in the Journal, in the pestilential climate of St. Domingo.
Count O'Connell was not accurate in saying that the Inn in which Dan would be entered was the Temple. As a matter of fact, he was entered at Lincoln's Inn on January 30th, 1794. He was also entered as a student at Gray's Inn on April 26th, 1796, and kept one term there. Although Inns were established in Ireland for the benefit of students of the law so far back as the reign of Edward I., no Irish lawyer could practise at the bar from the year 1542 down to a recent time without keeping terms at an English Inn. Refer- ence to this matter will be found in a note to the entry under date February i8th, 1796. Why O'Connell entered as a student at Gray's Inn it is
The Last Colonel of the Irish Brigade, ii. 145.
EARLY LIFE 49
hard to see. Possibly it may have been because his friend Richard Newton Bennett belonged to that Inn, having been admitted on May 7th, 1793.
Thearrangement that O'Connell should move from the boarding-house where he was living in January, 1794, to another where Mr. Duggan was already a boarder, seems to have been abandoned, or at any rate to have been adhered to for only a very short time, for Count O'Connell writes to his brother Maurice on March 12th in that year, " Our nephew Dan has been entered at the Temple with the requisite formalities, and is now in private lodgings. I really think from what I have learned, and from what I can compute, that he would be unable to support himself in the most modest gentility under ;fi20 English per annum." ^ The word " English " was inserted because the curren- cies of the two countries were not assimilated at this time, the English pound sterling bearing to the pound Irish the ratio of thirteen to twelve. From a letter quoted below it would appear that the thrifty old gentleman demurred to this expense.
Some references to O'Connell occur in the Count's letters to Hunting-cap written in the period immediately preceding the commencement of the Journal. In that of March 12th, 1794, already quoted, he writes that "Maurice carries you a translation of the memoir I drew up of the plan of operations for
' The Last Colonel of the Irish Brigade, ii. 148.
50 DANIEL O'CONNELL
the campaign of 1794." Maurice, as appears from the same letter, was to set out with Dan Mahony that afternoon for DubHn, and thence immediately for Cork. On August 21st following he writes, " Poor Dan, our nephew, has had a severe fit of sickness, but is now recovered, and returned to town." ^ That his recovery was maintained appears from a letter of November 6th, in which the writer says, "Dan is very well."'' In his letter of the 29th of the same month he says, " Dan is in my room, and begs his love and respects to you. He has moved near Lincoln's Inn, and is settled in a family much to his satisfaction." ^
At this period the half-formed political opinions of O'Connell assumed a definite shape. He had returned from Douay almost a Tory; but the trial, in the autumn of 1794, of Hardy, the secretary of the London Corresponding Society, for high treason, which O'Connell attended, resulted in fully and finally converting him to popular opinions and principles and confirming his natural detestation of tyranny and his desire of resisting it.^
O'Connell lived in a cul de sac off Coventry Street, London, in 1794.* This probably was the place referred to in the Count's letter of November 29th,
^ The Last Colonel of the Irish Brigade, ii. 151. 2 Ih. 153.
^ Life and Speeches of Daniel O'Connell, by John O'Connell, p. II.
* Personal Recollections, i. 277.
EARLY LIFE 51
1794, quoted above (p. 49), and is not unlikely to have been Mrs. Tracey's, mentioned in the title-page of the Journal, for no change of residence is referred to in any of the Count's letters after that date.
Early in 1795 steps were taken to enter O'Connell as a student in Dublin. The Count writes on February 26th, ** The day after I had written to you I called on Mr. Franks [the family solicitor], and have taken care that every requisite information be given him in writing for the purpose of enabling him to have Nephew Dan entered in Dublin next term, which he pledges himself to do. He showed me a memorial which he presented to that end, in which were several blanks, which I filled in, namely the name of his mother before her marriage, whether he be the eldest son of Mr. Morgan O'Connell, where he had been educated, etc. I fortunately was able to answer all these questions, by which all further difficulties are removed. Dan's letter to Mr. Franks came to Dublin at a time when he was absent ; therefore the disappointment, or rather the delay, cannot be imputed to our Dan, because he could not foresee the circumstance. I hope you have before now received his letter which I forwarded you from here, and I beseech you to relieve him from the anxiety he feels lest he might have incurred your displeasure."^ The Count was equally anxious that
1 Personal Recollections, i. 157.
52 DANIEL O'CONNELL
O'Connell should have an adequate allowance. He wrote on March 14th, 1795, " I really spoke from conviction when I told you our nephew could not possibly live in London under ;;f 130 or ;f 140 per annum. Every article has risen in price very con- siderably, and in the line he lives in a certain appear- ance must be kept up. You know as well as I do that professional abilities, however transcendent, require to be supported by genteel manners and gentlemanly education. Mixing in good company is the only way of acquiring them, and if a young man is obliged, for want of means, to live as a recluse, it cannot be expected that he will appear in the world with all the advantages which the habit of living in good company can alone confer, a consciousness of which is, in my opinion, likely to beget a diffidence and timidity which the world is apt to construe in an uncharitable light. I submit to your better judgment, and believe me, etc." ^
O'Connell's memorial to be admitted a student of the King's Inns, Dublin, was received on March 4th, 1795, and is signed by J. (probably Jeremiah) Keller. The bond required from all students was executed by John Franks, York Street, Dublin, barrister-at-law, Matthew Franks, of the same street, attorney-at-law, and Henry Wade, of the same street, attorney-at-law. The actual date of his admission as a student is not recorded, but it
^ The Last Colonel of the Irish Brigade, ii. 161.
EARLY LIFE 53
would be the " Grand Day " of Easter term, 1795, which is the second Thursday in that term. Eight gentlemen were admitted students on April 29th, 1795, and no doubt O'Connell was one of them. He did not keep any of his terms at the King's Inns until he returned to Dublin, some time before December 3rd, 1796.
A scrape that O'Connell got into on April 26th, 1795, will be found duly described in the entry in the Journal under date February i8th, 1796.
O'Connell paid a visit to Darrynane in 1795. He set out on June 7th, travelling by way of Milford Haven and Waterford, and returned to London in October of the same year.^ He gave O'Neill Daunt an account of the return journey : " My first day's journey was to Carhen, my second to Killorglin, my third to Tralee, my fourth to Limerick ; two days thence to Dublin. I sailed from Dublin in the evening. My passage to Holyhead was performed in twenty-four hours. From Holyhead to Chester took six-and-thirty hours, from Chester to London three days." ^ The journey, therefore, occupied eleven days and a half. It can now be done in twenty-four hours or less. O'Connell mentions in the Journal below (p. 157) his having been in Iveragh in the summer of 1795, and having hunted there. The following letter from his uncle
^ Letter from Count O'Connell to Hunting-cap printed in The Last Colonel of the Irish Brigade, ii. i68. See below, p. 158. " Personal Recollections, i. 136.
54 DANIEL O'CONNELL
Maurice to his mother tells about his doings at this time : " Your son left this ten days ago, and took with him my favourite horse. Had it not been for that, I might have dispensed with his company. He is, I am told, employed m visiting the seats of hares at Kularig, the earths of foxes at Tarmons, the caves of otters at Bolus, and the celebration of Miss Burke's wedding at Direen — useful avocations, laudable pursuits, for a nominal student of the law ! The many indications he has given of a liberal mind in the expenditure of money has left a vacuum in my purse, as well as an impression on my mind not easily eradicated." This letter is printed in The Last Colonel of the Irish Brigade (vol. ii. p. 272). The writer of that work obtained it from the lady known in the family as Miss Julianna, who in her youth had gone to keep house for her aged kinsman. She could not fix the date of the letter ; but as O'Connell never appears to have visited Darrynane while he was a law student but this once, it must have been written during the summer or autumn of
1795-
Having now brought the record of O'Connell's life down to this period, we leave his Journal, which begins towards the close of 1795, to continue the narrative down to June 4th, 1802, when it ends with a statement of the hours of retiring and rising and of the legal work of the day.
The foregoing sketch of O'Connell's life up to the time when he began to keep his Journal will,
EARLY LIFE 55
it is hoped, enable the reader to form a clearer appreciation of the contents of this remarkable record of the pursuits and the studies, the failings and the virtues, the fears and the hopes, the resolutions and the aspirations, of the illustrious man who therein reveals his inmost thoughts, with- out the smallest idea that one day his written con- fessions would be read by the public, and would prove to the world that the life which he devoted to the service of his country had been consecrated to that glorious object from the time when he was but a stripling.
The reader will perhaps desire to have some idea what manner of man the Liberator was. The Editor of his Journal saw him once, but it was in the dusk of the evening, and as he was walking between two small men, one of them being Thomas Francis Meagher, and this may have given to a child an exaggerated notion of his size, which seemed immense. O'Connell's cotemporaries have left a full-length portrait of him, and this is what they tell us. His frame was vigorous ; his figure was tall and erect. He was broad-shouldered and deep-chested ; he had a well-set head. In face he was extremely comely. The features were at once soft and manly ; the countenance was national in outline, the expression open and confiding. He had bright and sweet blue eyes, the most kindly and honest-looking. To these natural gifts was added that priceless one a marvellous voice, powerful
D.C, F
56 DANIEL O'CONNELL
— leonine, as Sir Charles Gavan Duffy calls it — sonorous, penetrating, melodious, capable of express- ing every shade of human feeling, " capable of all modulations in the gamut of passion or persuasion," of speaking in the smallest assembly, in the smallest room, in tones adapted to surroundings so limited, or of reaching the farthest extremity of an open- air meeting of hundreds of thousands of people.^ Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton finely depicts one of these scenes : —
" Once to my sight the giant thus was given, Walled by wide air and roofed by boundless heaven ; Beneath his feet the human ocean lay, And wave on wave flowed into space away. Methought no clarion could have sent the sound E'en to the centre of the hosts around ; And as I thought rose the sonorous swell, As from some church-tower swings the silvery bell, Aloft and clear, from airy tide to tide ; It glided easy, as a bird may glide, To the last verge of that vast audience sent ; It played with each wild passion as it went."
But a voice is nothing without a command of words, and words are nothing where ideas are lack- ing. O'Connell had an abundance of both. Poetic fancy and homely wit, delicate humour and deep pathos, subtle flattery and bitter sarcasm,, gentle
^ At the " monster " meetings held in 1843 the attendance ranged from 150,000 at Drogheda and TuUamore, for example, to 700,000 at Clare and Tara (O'Flanagan, Life and Times of Daniel O'Connell, pp. 679, 680).
EARLY LIFE 57
persuasion and fierce denunciation, each, as the occasion required, flowed in an inexhaustible stream from those eloquent lips, to charm or to amuse, to persuade or to dismay. Nor was it the masses alone that fell under the spell of his eloquence. Judges and juries bowed to its influence. During the last hour of his practice at the bar he kept the court alternately in tears and in roars of laughter, as he tells us himself.^ The effect he produced in Parlia- ment may be gathered from the following extracts from a letter addressed to Mr. Edward Dwyer : —
" London, Novetnbey yd, 1830. " My dear Friend, — The scene last night in the House was a most extraordinary one. There never was yet any man so beset as I was when I went into the House, and during the first speeches every allusion to me of an unkind nature was cheered. Although Peel attacked me directly, he sat down amid rapturous applause. I got up at once. They at first were disposed to slight me, but I rebuked them with indigna- tion, and certainly took my wicked will of them fully and to my heart's content. I cannot be a judge of my own speaking, but I know that I threw out in my old Association style. I also know that the result was most cheering for me, for the men who had been standing off from me before, and were not only cool, but hostile, became of a sudden most cordial in their manner and confidential in their declarations. One perceives a change of this description better than they can describe it, and the change was complete. . . . There has been a respectable tradesman in here this moment. He says he belongs to a society who read the newspapers in Paternoster Row, and he came to know whether my speech in the Morning
' Life of O'Conncll, by J. A. Hamilton, p. 12.
58 DANIEL O'CONNELL
Chronicle was genuine, because if it were they had entered into a subscription to get it printed and distributed gratis. I of course assented, so, you see, the thing works. Every moment convinces me more and more of the certainty of our repealing the Union. Last night was, in my judgment, almost decisive of it. The House will yield to the unanimous petitions of the people."
Such was O'Connell in public. In private life he was the most delightful of companions. His gaiety was exuberant. " When he laughed," said a prelate of the Catholic Church in Ireland to Miss Cusack, who edited the Liberator's public letters and speeches, " he laughed in every inch of his body."
Yet this was the man whom the poets of the Times newspaper described as " the long-tailed Irish baboon," and as " a foul creature of the sun and slime," the slime, be it observed, being " slime condensed of Irish bog " ! But every Irishman who takes a prominent part in the struggle for the legislative independence of his country must be prepared to see himself made the butt of the clumsy wit and coarse invective of those who deem the Union a thing so precious as to be worth the heavy price that has been paid for it, in the brutalities and the corruption by which it was carried, and the misery and discontent which have followed in its train.
JOURNAL
w
{a) This word is written, in letters resembling print, on the cover, which is of cardboard, with a marbled pattern upon it.
D.C. G
A JOURNAL
FOR THE YEARS 1795 AND 1796 AND 1797 AND 1798
AND 1799
KEPT BY D. O'CONNELL
MEMBER OF LINCOLN'S INN
Containing Remarks on the Events of the Day ;
Thoughts on Various Subjects ; Anecdotes ;
speeches; Quotations, S'C, S'C, S'C.
London, at Mr. Tracey's, from No. i to No. 3. Chyswick, at Mrs. Rigby's, from No. 3 to No. 25. Dublin, at Mrs. Jones's, from No. 25 to No. 70. Dublin, at No. 14, Trinity Place, from No. 70 to (b).
(b) This forms the title-page to the Journal. The word "years" was originally "year," the "s" being added when
G 2
62 DANIEL O'CONNELL
the Journal was continued in the year 1796. The word and figures "and 1799" are placed below a horizontal line, as shown above. "And 1797" was added on January 5th of that year, as appears from entry No. 39. After a break from February 4th, 1799, the Journal is resumed on June ist, 1802, but only for three days.
" Remarks on the Events of the Day " — so far, at any rate, as public events are concerned — are but few, and are very far between. Occurrences of great moment, both to O'Connell himself and to Ireland, happened in the period covered by the Journal, but no reference to them is to be found in it. His call to the bar, which took place on May 19th, 1798, is not recorded, though it must have been a great relief to him to find that the doubt he felt whether, having regard to " the complexion of affairs," as he writes under date January 13th, 1798, he would be called, was set at rest. A discreet silence, too, is observed with respect to the rebelHon that took place the same year. The only mention of that event in the Journal is a conversation with his friend Bennett, recorded on January 2nd, 1799, in the course of which they "talked much of the late unhappy rebellion." Even the Union finds no place in the Journal. Not that O'Connell did not feel deeply on the subject, for his first public speech, made at the Royal Exchange, Dublin, on January 13th, 1800, was against that measure. He was in Dublin when the Act of Union was passed, and how deeply he felt at the time can be judged from what he said to O'Neill Daunt : " I was maddened when I heard the bells of St. Patrick's ringing out a joyful peal for Ireland's degradation, as if it were a glorious national festival. My blood boiled, and I vowed on that morning that the foul national dishonour should not last, if ever I could put an end to it " {Personal Recollections of O'Connell, by O'Neill Daunt, i. p. 202). As O'Connell was not married until June 23rd, 1802, and the Journal ceases on the 4th of that month, there could, of course, be no reference in it to the actual cele- bration of the marriage ; but it is somewhat remarkable that the approaching event is not hinted at in any way : there
JOURNAL 63
are no apostrophes to Mary, as, five years before, there were to " sweet EHza." Two events of the day were chronicled in the Journal. One was the attack made in 1795 on George III. in St. James's Park, during which O'Connell had a narrow escape from being cut down by a dragoon. From the "number," to use O'Connell's own term, under date January 5th, 1797, it appears that this occurrence was recorded in the first entry in the Journal, which, with the second and part of the third, has been torn out. The incident will be found fully described in a note to entry No. 39. As it occurred on October 29th, 1795, the Journal must have been commenced on or after that date. The other of the public " events of the day " recorded in the Journal is the change which commenced with the dismissal of the Duke of Leinster from his place in the Hanaper Office, referred to under date May ist, 1797. The rest of this entry and the whole of the following entry are torn out.
If the Journal is poor in remarks on the events of the day, it is rich in " Thoughts on Various Subjects." The principal subjects, and O'Connell's thoughts upon them, will be found collected in the Introduction, to which the reader is therefore referred.
Anecdotes or speeches are not to be found in the Journal. Quotations are few. Among them there are one from Aken- side, on December 31st, 1795, one from Shakespeare, on December 24th, 1796, and one from Adam Smith, on Decem- ber 3rd, 1796. The Journal abounds, however, in passages giving the substance of what O'Connell read from day to day.
The Journal refers to an incident that occurred before its commencement, namely the scrape that O'Connell got into on April 26th, 1795, which is recorded in the entry numbered 24, under date February i8th, 1796.
[3] (c) I met De Vignier to-day. He is about to go off to St. Domingo. He told me that the emancipated French negroes were tired of liberty ;
64 DANIEL O'CONNELL
that they wished for, nay, called for, their ancient slavery. I will not detail the causes which, accord- ing to him, have stirred up this unnatural hatred of freedom in the bosoms of men who certainly experienced few of the sweets of despotism. I have enough of nonsense of my own (d). I have entirely lost this day owing to my being in town. I believe it will be better for me [to] attend the Society {e) no longer. It is true I there acquire a great fluency of speech, but the loss of time and money which my attendance occasions makes me conceive it preferable to go there no more.
(c) This figure and subsequent figures placed within brackets, show the pages of the Journal. The first two pages, containing two entries and part of a third, are missing. On the fragment ot the missing sheet that remains " Revo- " and " Liberty " appear in what was p. 2. It is probable that O'Connell tore out the entry in 1797 or 1798, when he was in danger of being arrested in connection with the insurrectionary movement at that time in operation (see note to No. 27). In the first entry there seems to have been recorded the incident alluded to in the entry under date January 5th, 1797, namely the attack on the King in St. James's Park in 1795, already referred to. The Editor has been unable to ascertain who De Vignier, mentioned in this entry, was ; but he was probably an emigre, who served in one of the West India regiments formed when the Irish Brigade was disbanded. He is referred to again in entry No. 24.
(d) By a decree of the Legislative Assembly of May 15th, 1 79 1, it was enacted that the " people of colour " in the French colonies born of free parents were entitled as of right to the enjoyment of all the privileges of French citizens, including those of having votes in the choice of representatives and
JOURNAL 65
being eligible to seats in the parochial and colonial assemblies. The plantation slaves rose in rebellion in August, 1791. The decree of May was annulled by one of September 24th, 1791, and thereupon the " people of colour " united with the slaves against the whites. On April 4th, 1792, another decree was passed by which people of colour and free negroes were given votes and made eligible to the Legislature and all places of trust. Meantime the civil war in the island raged with un- abated fury. The French Government sent out commissioners, who, in 1793, proclaimed the freedom of the slaves, and the Government ratified their act. In the same year, when the war with France had begun, the English Government were induced by the representations of the planters to send out an expedition to conquer and annex St. Domingo. The island was invaded in September, 1793. Toussaint Louverture, the famous leader of the negroes, united with the French in resisting the invaders. The war lasted till towards the end of 1798, when General Maitland concluded negotiations with Toussaint, giving up all the places of which the English had taken possession, and entering into commercial stipulations which recognised St. Domingo as an independent and neutral Power. The climate played sad havoc with the British troops, which consisted largely of the (English) Irish Brigade, formed after the foreign troops in the service of France had been disbanded. Maurice O'Connell, the Liberator's younger brother, was one of its latest victims. See entry No. 71.
The contempt which O'Connell displays in this entry for the suggestion that the negroes were enamoured of slavery is in harmony with the ardent love of liberty that he expresses in entry No. 36, and his apostrophe to liberty in No. 47. He made a most powerful speech in Parliament in favour of the emancipation of the slaves in the colonies. " Let us," he said, " hear no more of breeding farms for slaves on the one hand, with their consignment to early graves on the other ; but let us pour across the wide Atlantic into the ear of the miscreant slave-owner that we scorn his hypocritical example, and will not debase ourselves by countenancing this foul crime against
/
66 DANIEL O'CONNELL
man and against the Almighty." A friend once suggested that he might at least be silent on slavery at the Repeal Association, as he injured their question by mixing it up with the slavery question. " No," replied O'Connell, " virtues are gregarious, and I assure you that, so far from being weakened, these measures will gain strength by being combined." Some advocates of slavery in Cincinnati addressed to the Association a document in which they defended the institution on the ground that " the very odour of the negro is almost insufferable to the white." O'Connell's reply was scathing. It wound up with the words " The negroes would certainly smell, at least, as sweet when free as they do now, being slaves " [Personal Recollections, i. 287 — 288).
(e) This no doubt refers to " The Honourable Society of Cogers," now commonly called " Ye Antient Society of Cogers," of which O'Connell was a member in the years 1794 — 1796. At the time this entry was made he was living at Chiswick. In 183 1 the Cogers subscribed ;^io towards the expenses of defending his seat in Dublin, and in 1844 they celebrated the decision of the House of Lords quashing the conviction of O'Connell and his associates by a packed jury of the city of Dublin. Lord Denman, who, in delivering judgment in the case, declared that " if such practices as have taken place in the present instance in Ireland should continue, trial by jury would become a mockery, a delusion, and a snare," was a Coger. So were Jack Wilkes, John Philpot Curran, Lord Russell of Killowen, and Charles Stewart Parnell. The Society, which was founded by Daniel Mason in 1755, flourishes still (see Peter Rayleigh's History of ye Antient Society of Cogers, pp. 35, 36). It originally met at the White Bear, Bride Lane, and continued to do so until about 1856, when it removed to what was formerly No. 10 Shoe Lane, Fleet Street, in a hall adjoining the " Blue Posts " tavern. Those who wish to form an idea of the proceedings at a meeting of the Society will find a graphic description in a quotation given in Old and New London from a work by Mr. J. C. Parkinson, where, from the solemn opening of the discussion by " my Grand " —
JOURNAL 67
the President — down to the silent removal by the attendants of the empty glasses of the audience and their replenishment, they are duly chronicled, as are also the witty and sarcastic speeches of some of the orators that took part in the debates. The hall in Shoe Lane continued to be the place of meeting until 1870, when it was bought by the Corporation of London. The Society removed to the " Barley Mow," Salisbury Square, in January, 1871, and subsequently to the ** Rainbow" tavern in Fleet Street, where its meetings continue to be held. It is the sole survivor of a number of similar societies that flourished in London in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The constitution and objects of the Society appear from the follow- ing entry in a minute-book of 1793, quoted by Mr. Rayleigh in the interesting work to which reference has been already made : — " The Society originally consisted of citizens of London, who met to watch the course of political events and the conduct of their representatives in Parliament. The objects of the Society were the promotion of the Liberty of the Subject and the Freedom of the Press, the maintenance of Loyalty to the Laws, the rights and claims of Humanity, and the practice of public and private virtue." These were objects dear to the heart of O'Connell, and he must have found himself in a con- genial atmosphere among his fellow-Cogers of the years imme- diately following the date of this minute. The name " Coger," the second letter of which is to be pronounced long, seems to come from cogito, " I think."
" Irish questions," says Mr. Rayleigh (p. 209), "have always been popular in Cogers' Hall, and Irish advocates prominent. During the great Home Rule struggle Cogers' Hall was full, even though the meetings were held every night of the week, as was the case up to recent years. Throughout all modern press notices of the Society — and these are the impartial recorders we rely upon — we find that Irishmen were always foremost in the debates. It was so in Curran's and O'Connell's days, so also in the Shoe Lane period ; and it must be regarded as significant that the persistence of Irish affairs in our national politics has always been reflected in the Cogerian debates."
68 DANIEL O'CONNELL
During the Fenian agitation Tynan — " No. i " — dropped in. The knives intended for the assassination of Lord Frederick Cavendish, Mr. Rayleigh tells us (p. 254), were deposited in a bag at the bar while the owner was within at the debate. Mr. Arthur J. Balfour is one of the existing members.
I sent off a letter to my father by this day's post, and am now going to finish one I have already commenced to John (/).
(/) His brother, to whom he was greatly attached (see entry No. 43). The despatch of this letter is recorded in the next entry.
No. 4{g), Friday, December 11th, 1795. — I went to bed last night at a quarter after twelve, and did not get up this morning until five minutes after eleven. I remain in general too long in bed. This I must endeavour to correct. It is a custom equally detrimental to the constitution and to the mind. It destroys the vigour and energy of the one ; and prevents, by its consumption of time, the other from acquiring that strength which information infuses (h).
(g) When this entry was made O'Connell, as appears from the entries on the title-page prefixed to the Journal, had left Mrs. Tracey's and gone to Mrs. Rigby's at Chiswick. Indeed, it would seem that when the entry No. 3 was written he was already staying at Chiswick, for otherwise the reference to his losing a day by being in town is not intelligible. From the description he gave O'Neill Daunt, Mrs. Tracey's seems to have been situated in a court or cul de sac on the north side of Coventry Street. A description of Mrs. Rigby's will be found in entry No. 10. He remained there till about December 3rd, 1796, and during his stay indulged in the pleasure of boating
JOURNAL 69
on the river, which, as he told O'Neill Daunt, made serious inroads on his purse {Personal Recollections, i. 277).
(h) This is the first of many entries in which O'Connell reproaches himself with the habit of lying too long in bed. The very last entry in the Journal, made on June 4th, 1802, records the hours of going to bed and of getting up. This may have been one of the " bad habits " which, as appears from a letter of December loth, 1795, his uncle Maurice had pointed out to him. How completely he overcame the habit in after-life will appear from the following article, believed to be by Shell, contributed in 1823 to the National Review.
The writer supposes a visitor to Dublin, while returning from a ball, to pass through Merrion Square between five and six o'clock on a winter's morning, and to peer through the parlour windows of one of the splendid mansions of that fashionable quarter. "The half-opened shutters," he writes, " and the light within announce that someone dwells there whose time is too precious to regulate his rising with the sun's. Should your curiosity tempt you to ascend the steps, and under cover of the dark to reconnoitre the interior, you will see a tall able-bodied man standing at a desk immersed in solitary occu- pation. Upon the wall in front of him hangs a crucifix. From this and the calm attitude of the person within, and from a certain monastic rotundity about his neck and shoulders, your first impression will be that he must be some pious dignitary of the Church of Rome, absorbed in his matin devotions. But this conjecture will be dismissed almost as soon as formed. No sooner can the eye take in the other furniture of the apart- ment— the bookcases stocked with tomes in plain calfskin, and blue-covered octavos strewing the tables and floor, the reams of manuscript in oblong folds and begirt with crimson tape — than it becomes evident that the party meditating amidst such objects must be thinking far more of the law than of the prophets." This, the writer explains, is but the prelude to a day of incessant exertion in court, at public meetings, and at a public dinner, " from which, after having acted a conspicuous part in the turbulent festivity of the evening and thrown oft
70 DANIEL O'CONNELL
half a dozen speeches in praise of Ireland, he retires at a late hour to repair the wear and tear of the day by a short interval of repose, and is sure to be found before dawn-break the next morning at his solitary post, recommencing the routine of his restless existence." O'Connell himself in his letter to the Earl of Shrewsbury in defence of his claim to the repeal rent, speaking of this period of his life, says that his sleep was *' restricted to the narrowest hours before dawn." The habit of early rising thus acquired he retained till late in life. He tells us himself that in 1841, when he was sixty-five years of age, he rose by candle-light, and often went to mass before breakfast {Personal Recollections, i. 225). Even in youth there was one thing that made him get up betimes, hare-hunting. His son John says, " Often has the writer of these pages heard him describe in his own graphic manner his going out before dawn to ensure that his few hounds should have the help of the scent still lying." Fishing as well as coursing was a favourite sport of O'Connell.
Bower, the attorney, got me served with a copy of a writ for the amount of Eugene McCarthy's bill. I owe this to my own negligence. I have the bill for near six weeks, always resolved to send it off without delay ; and still it remains as yet unsent. I remark a great deal of neglect, or at least a certain dilatoriness of disposition, which seems a constitutional failing of mine. I must endeavour to be more than usually active for some time to come in order to get rid of this bad habit. I have another observation to make on Bower's business. It is that I have no right to charge E. McCarthy with the expense of the writ (i). I read this day thirteen chapters of the Bible, six pages of Espinasse's Nisi Prius, and thirty-five pages
JOURNAL 71
of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, I have this day begun the Bible. I have never read it through. I did not read law enough. I will — at least, I intend for the future to — read twelve pages, if not more, a day. When I have occasion to mention Espinasse in future I will do it thus, viz., " E. N. P." ; Blackstone's Commentaries thus, " B. C." ; Coke on Littleton thus, " C. L." I mean to study until I go to bed. It wants five minutes to ten, so this is not the whole work of the day. " Sed dum loquimur fugit invida aetas " (^).
(t) The failing here described abode with him to the end of his days. He was especially careless in money matters. His brother James said of him that he was in pecuniary difficulties since the age of fourteen {Four Years of Irish History, p. 399, n.). He mentions another example of it himself in No. 6 below (p. 77). Eugene McCarthy was, no doubt, his cousin, the son of his aunt Elizabeth, who married Timothy McCarthy, of Ochtermony, county Kerry. Eugene, " the wild handsome boy that sister Betty got so many lectures about," as Mrs. Morgan John O'Connell describes him, went to France to his uncle. Count O'Connell, when he was about ten years old. His wildness gave the Count " a surfeit of bringing over any others," but nevertheless he rose to be a colonel in the French service, and was lieutenant-colonel in " O'Connell's " regiment in the (English) Irish Brigade. Count O'Connell got him a commission in Walsh's regiment in the Irish Brigade in 1776, and having distinguished himself in an engagement in which he was wounded, the Count got him a captaincy and a " grati- fication" in 1780. The Count also got him, in 1785, a cap- taincy in the Dutch service, which brought him in an income of ;^i5o, while at the same time his place in Walsh's regiment was kept open for him. He is mentioned in the Count's letter
72 DANIEL O'CONNELL
of January 26th, 1794, quoted above (p. 47), and in his letter of May gth, 1801, quoted hereafter, in which he tells Dan of Eugene's death [The Last Colonel of the Irish Brigade, i. 9, 194 ; ii. 38, 46, 190, 235, 256).
{k) We here obtain for the first time an idea of the works that, at this important period of his life, were the subject of his study. There are only two other references to the Bible in the Journal, namely in entries Nos. 5 and 28.
Espinasse's Nisi Prius is a collection of reports of decisions given by judges in the years from 1793 to 1799, inclusive, on points of law raised in the course of trials by jury. In the letter referred to in the next entry he says to his uncle Maurice : " The only law books I have bought as yet are the works of Espinasse on the trials at Nisi Prius. They cost me £1 los., and contain more information on the practical part of the law than any other books I have ever met." O'Connell's keen sense of justice soon led him to feel a profound dislike to the quirks and quibbles by which, at that time, cases were decided (see his observations on this subject in entry No. 20). The other law books mentioned here. Sir William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England and Lord Coke's edition of Littleton on Land Tenures, are still standard works, though of course the law has undergone many changes since they were written. Of Gibbon, O'Connell was a most diligent student and a most enthusiastic admirer. By January 13th, 1798, he tells us, he had read five volumes and a half of The Decline and Fall, and in a few days would have the whole concluded. He adds, " It is an extraordinary, it is an admirable, work. The genius, the critical acumen, the laborious research, of the author are unrivalled. He has mended my style. He has improved my thoughts. He has enriched my memory."
In the Introduction will be found a classified list of the books mentioned by O'Connell during the period covered by the Journal. He read others not mentioned (see No. 5 below, p. 74). The Latin quotation is from Horace, Od. i. 11. It should have run — " Dum loquimur, fugerit invida aetas."
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I sent off a letter to John.
No. 5, Saturday, December 12th, 1795. — I went to bed last night a few minutes after twelve, and got up this morning at nine. This is giving too much time to sleep. However, we hope we shall improve as we go on.
I have written part of a letter to my uncle Maurice (/) . My reading consisted of fifteen chapters of the Bible, fifteen pages of " E. N. P. C," and thirty-four pages of Gibbon, to p. 132. I have likewise written a page of a book equal in size of extracts from the last-mentioned author.
(/) Maurice O'Connell, known as " Hunting-cap," by whom O'Connell was brought up. The letter was not finished until the 14th, as the entry under that date records. It is as follows : —
" Chiswick, near London,
''December lotJi, 1795.
"My dear Uncle, — I delayed answering your letter until I should have it in my power to inform you that I had changed my place of residence in conformity to your desire.
" On calculating the expenses of retiring to a cheaper spot, and returning to keep my term on January ist, I found it would not answer, so I dropped the scheme. I am now only four miles from town, yet perfectly retired. I pay the same price for board and lodging as I should in London ; but I enjoy many advantages here, besides air and retirement. The society in this house is mixed, I mean composed of men and women, all of whom are people of rank and knowledge of the world, so that their conversation and manners are well adapted to rub off the rust of scholastic education, nor is there any danger of riot or dissipation, as they are all advanced in life, another student of law and I being the only other young persons in the house.
74 DANIEL O'CONNELL
This young man is my most intimate acquaintance, and the only friend I have found amongst my acquaintances. His name is Bennett. He is an Irish young man of good family connections and fortune. He has good sense, ability, and application. I knew him before my journey to Ireland. It was before that period our friendship commenced, so that on the whole I spend my time here not only pleasantly, but, I hope, usefully.
"The only law books I have bought as yet are the works of Espinasse on the trials at Nisi Prius. They cost me ;^i los., and contain more information on the practical part of the law than any I have ever met. When in Dublin I saw that carrying any more books than were absolutely necessary would be incurring expense, so I deferred buying a complete set of reports until my return thither.
" I have now two objects to pursue, the one the attainment of knowledge, the other the acquisition of all those qualities that constitute the polite gentleman. I am convinced that the former, besides the immediate pleasure that it yields, is calcu- lated to raise me to honours, rank, and fortune ; and I know that the latter serves as a first passport or general recom- mendation ; and as for the motives of ambition which you suggest, I assure you that no man possesses more of it than I do. I have indeed a glowing and — if I may use the expression — an enthusiastic ambition, which converts every toil into a pleasure and every study into amusement.
" Though nature may have given me subordinate talents, I never will be satisfied with a subordinate position in my profession. No man is able, I am aware, to supply the total deficiency of abilities ; but everybody is capable of improving and enlarging a stock however small, and, in its beginning, contemptible. It is this reflection that affords me most consolation. It is not because I assert these things now that I should consider myself entitled to call on you to believe them. I refer that conviction that I wish to inspire to your experience. I hope, may I flatter myself, that when we meet again the success of my efforts to correct those bad habits that you
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pointed out to me will be apparent. Indeed, as for my know- ledge in the professional line, that cannot be discovered for some years to come, but I have time in the interim to prepare myself to appear with greater eclat on the grand theatre of the world.
"You have heard of the capture of Mannheim. The Austrians continue to advance rapidly on the French side of the Rhine. They are said to be marching towards Luxemburg. In the meantime the French are evacuating Holland. Whether this event will be favourable to the Stadtholder is as yet uncertain. The Ministry, who have been unpopular by reason of the two Bills of which you must have heard, and in general [owing] to the ill success of the war, already tottered in their seats ; but the brilliant victories of the Austrians have secured them at least for some time. That we shall soon have peace is no longer in question. Everybody believes it, and the King's messages to Parliament confirm the belief. " I am, dear Uncle,
" Your affectionate and dutiful nephew,
" Daniel O'Connell "
(Fitzpatrick, Correspondence of Daniel O'Connell, i. g).
This diplomatic epistle must have mightily pleased his uncle. Its display of thrift, the deference to his wishes and the submis- sion to his censures which it expresses, must have flattered his vanity ; the resolution to spare no effort to shine in the profes- sion which he had chosen for his nephew must have been gratifying to his ambition. Dan had already begun to practise those arts of conciliation in which he afterwards became a past- master. Some account of his fellow-boarders is given by O'Connell in subsequent entries (see pp. 104, 105, 108).
I may here remark that I do not intend to mention everything I read. I conceive the trifling productions of the day unworthy my notice. It is true time is lost in reading, but it would be adding to the loss to write down their names.
D.C. H
76 DANIEL O'CONNELL
I am now at a loss for materials to swell out this number to the size of the others. I shall there- fore descant a little on style (m). My letters and writings in general have the appearance more of a jumbled mass than of a united train of ideas. This defect has, I believe, two sources, the one an inherent shallowness of conception, [5] the other frequent interruption. The first can be remedied one \_sic] by the attainment of a more enlarged stock of ideas ; the latter, being only a bad custom, may be laid aside with the assistance of care.
(m) O'Connell recurs to the subject of his style in the next entry and in No. 23. In No. 70, written on January 30th, 1798, he tells us that the perusal of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire had mended his style. He was in the habit of making extracts from this work, as he mentions above.
No. 6, Sunday, December i^th, 1795. — I went to bed last night at about half after eleven, and got up this morning at half after nine. Since I wrote yesterday's number, which was at a late hour last night, I have read from the 132nd to the 248th page of Gibbon's Decline and Fall. The number of pages were consequently two hundred and sixteen. Let me observe that it is the second volume which is mentioned as having afforded the subject of my reading a part of the last days. The extracts mentioned in p. 4 were taken from the first
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volume. When I change either I will set the alteration down.
In concluding last night I made a few remarks on my style. That subject I shall now take up again. In my letters I perceive that I am too fond of commencing my sentences with " I do this," or " I do that." Thus disuniting the phrases, they cannot run into one another as they should. I remember having read a remark on Caesar['sJ Commentaries that in them he shows his modesty by never using the word " Ego." If the contrary is a proof of vanity, I am well aware that it would be hard for me to acquit myself of the charge.
I should have finished my letter to my uncle this day, and have not done it. This [is] another instance of that neglect with which I have taxed myself so justly (w). The fact is, I did intend to terminate the letter, but I put off executing my intention from hour to hour. And so while I was resolving to act the day stole away. So true it is that procrastination is the thief of time.
(«) See above, No. 4.
Bennett (0) is to be married to-morrow. Within a short period that event is to befal him which, at least to one of my way of thinking, is the source of pure happiness or unmixed sorrow. For it is my opinion that there is no medium in the marriage state. To it I look forward for my felicity in this
H 2
78 DANIEL O'CONNELL
life (/)). Indeed, I believe we are generally looking forward [6]. I should express my meaning better by saying that, in my opinion, men always look forward to some future period of their lives, to some future event, for their happiness. '' When I have done this thing or that, then I will be happy." Such is the usual language of men. But, lo ! the period of the completion of their wishes arrives. With one man it is an advantageous marriage ; with another it is the acquisition of a fortune, with a third the restoration of health, etc., etc. The much-desired object once enjoyed, happiness, not found in it, is placed in some other unattained desire, which when come at is found as vain and empty as the former. Happiness again removes, and is again sought for in vain. This pursuit has been well compared by the poet Goldsmith to the endeavour at reaching the circle which bounds the horizon (q).
I read two chapters in the Bible.
(o) Richard Newton Bennett. He was a fellow-boarder of O'Connell at Chyswick, as appears from the letter to Hunting- cap of December loth, 1795, above quoted. He was the son of Mr. Richard Bennett, a county Wexford gentleman, and was a student of Gray's Inn (The Register of Admissions to Gray's Inn, 1521 — 1889, by Joseph Foster, p. 398). The friend- ship between them was lasting. Mr. Bennett accompanied O'Connell on his journey to Clare at the famous election. He lent and loaded the pistols, still preserved at Darrynane, which O'Connell used in his duel with D'Esterre. He afterwards became a colonial Chief Justice. In a letter to the Knight of
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Kerry dated June 24th, 1827, O'Connell writes, "There is a most particular friend of mine — a Mr. Bennett, of this bar — in London, looking for a judicial seat in the colonies. He has hopes of being made Chief Justice of Ceylon. I got Blake to write warmly to Philip Horton for him. Doherty wrote at my instance to Canning. I wrote in the strongest terms I could venture upon to Brougham. I most anxiously wish you could speak to Lord Lansdowne for him. If there be nothing incon- sistent with your present relations with the Marquis, to do it will be conferring another obligation upon me. I could not be more anxious for my brother than I am for Mr. Bennett. He has been at all times the decided friend of civil and religious liberty, and his promotion would give the greatest satisfaction to all that part of the Catholic party in Dublin who have been working for emancipation — that is, the really influential portion of the Catholic community " (Fitzpatrick, Correspondence of Daniel O'Connell, i. 147).
{p) O'Connell's own marriage was a very happy one. He was married to his cousin, Mary O'Connell, on June 23rd, 1802. She was descended from Sheara-na-mo-Mor, or Geoffrey of the Vast Herds. Her father was a medical man practising in Tralee. The ceremony was performed privately by the Rev. Mr. Finn, parish priest of Irishtown, at the resi- dence of Mr. James Connor, brother-in-law of the bride. For many months the marriage was kept a secret. " On one of our repeal journeys," says O'Neill Daunt — " namely, to Waterford — he adverted, as he frequently did, to the memory of the late Mrs. O'Connell. ' I never,' said he, ' proposed marriage to any woman but one — my Mary. I said to her, " Are you engaged. Miss O'Connell ? " She answered, " I am not." *' Then," said I, " will you engage yourself to me ? " "I will," was her reply. And I said I would devote my life to make her happy. She deserved that I should : she gave me thirty-four years of the purest happiness that man ever enjoyed. My uncle was desirous I should obtain a much larger fortune, and I thought he would disinherit me. But I did not care for that.' ' Did your wife live in Tralee ? ' O'Neill
8o DANIEL O'CONNELL
Daunt asks. 'She did, with her aunt,' replied O'Connell, * and it was my delight to quiz the old lady by pretending to complain of her granddaughter's want of temper. " Madam," said I, " Mary would do very well, only she is so cross." *' Cross, sir ? My Mary cross ? Sir, you must have provoked her very much ! Sir, my little girl was always the gentlest, sweetest creature born." And so she was,' he added, after a pause. * She had the sweetest, most heavenly temper, and the sweetest breath'" (^Personal Recollections, i. 133). If ever a great political leader and a true patriot found a help meet for him, O'Connell found one in his wife. His life was precious to her — she saved him from the risk of being killed or wounded in a duel with Peel — but his honour was more precious still. How many men have through the influence of their wives and children been induced to accept some office or some title which has blasted their career and destroyed their reputation for independence ! O'Connell was happily saved from such a temptation. The following letter was written by Mrs. O'Connell on the occasion of his having declined the offer of the Government of the day. It is dated " Merrion Square, Wednesday." The postmark is December 3rd, 1830.
" My dearest Love, — Thank God, you have acted like yourself, and your wife and children have more reason to be proud of you than they ever were. Had you acted differently from what you have done, it would have broken my heart. You can't abandon the people, who have always stood by you, and for whom you have sacrificed so much. You will, darling, be rewarded for all : you will have the prayers and blessings of your country to cheer and console you for what you have given up. Had you been betrayed into acceptance of the terms offered by Govern- ment, you would die of a broken heart before six months expired. You now stand firmly in the affections and in the love of your countrymen, and when that country is aware of the splendid sacrifice you have now made for them, depend upon it, they will strain every nerve to reward you. I shall
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hold up my head higher than ever I did. I shan't be afraid to look at the people, as I certainly should if you were a titled pensioner of the Government. I shan't say a word, as they give you their sentiments, their respective signatures attached. I never saw anything like [the] pleasure that danced in their eyes when assured of your refusal. May God bless you, my own love. Words are inadequate to tell you how much I love and respect you for this late act, so like and so worthy of your- self. My heart overflows with gratitude and pride for being the wife of such a man, and the mother of such grateful children. The report through town yesterday and to-day is that you are to be the new Master of the Rolls. You may rely on our discretion, though we long to have the great news public. What a welcome you will get from the people of Ireland ! May God bless and protect you. You will carry the repeal of the Union without bloodshed, as you did the eman- cipation. I put my trust in that God who sees and knows the purity of your heart. I can't write more here, there are so many in and out. With love from your children, believe me always with truth,
" Your fondest and most grateful
" Mary O'Connell."
The letter is addressed to 14, Manchester Buildings, West- minster, London. On the envelope containing the copy of the letter from which the above is printed is written, " When the Liberator was offered a peerage."
The match was very displeasing to his uncle Maurice, who wished him to marry Miss Healy, of Cork, a lady of wealth, but of homely features (Personal Recollections, i. 194). It must have been some time before his uncle forgave him, for we find the Count, who was the good genius of the family, interceding for Dan in a letter of August ist, 1804: " His fate must be truly deplorable, if you irrevocably cast him off. The bare perquisites of his profession are probably very inadequate to the support of a wife and family, besides his personal expenses." He adds, speaking of Dan's brother John, " I sincerely wish
82 DANIEL O'CONNELL
the unfavourable change in the expectations of his brother, to which no sense of his demerits, whatever they may be, is likely to reconcile his mind, may not make a dislike, or at least a froideur, between them " {The Last Colonel of the Irish Brigade, ii. 243).
O'Connell had a very high opinion of the influence of a mother on the character of her children. His son-in-law, Charles Bianconi, asked his advice about sending his daughter, a lovely child, to school. " Oh ! no, no, no," replied O'Connell eagerly, " never take her from her mother. Get a governess to assist her mother in little Kate's education, but never take the child from the mother's care. The tender affection of the mother educates the daughter's heart " (Personal Recollections,
i. 136).
{q) " Impelled, with steps unceasing, to pursue
Some fleeting good, that mocks me with the view, That, like the circle bounding earth and skies, Allures from far, yet, as I follow, flies."
These lines, extracted from The Traveller, follow immediately those in which Goldsmith describes so beautifully his brother's
home : —
" Blest that abode where want and pain repair, And every stranger finds a ready chair ; Blest be those feasts, with simple plenty crowned. Where all the ruddy family around Laugh at the jests or pranks that never fail, Or sigh with pity at some mournful tale, Or press the bashful stranger to his food, And learn the luxury of doing good."
Probably O'Connell had such a domestic circle in his mind when he moralised on the felicity that flows from a happy married life. If so, the prospect was realised. In a speech that he made in January, 1 841, at a temperance soiree given in Belfast by four hundred and fifty ladies of different religious opinions, he said, after a glowing eulogy upon his mother, *' I am a father, and I know what it is to respect as well as to love those whom, in parental language, I call my angel daughters. They have never given breath to a word of offence against
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me. ... I am a grandfather, and the chirping of my darling granddaughters sounds sweetly in my ears. ... I think within myself, * How happy the man will be that obtains them ! ' But that subject brings me back to a being of whom I dare not speak in the profanation of words. No, I will not mention that name. The man who is happiest in his domestic circle may have some idea of what my happiness was. Yes, I was her husband then. Did I say I was ? Oh ! yes, I am her husband still. The grave may separate us for a time, but we shall meet beyond it, never, I trust, to be separated more." O'Connell does not mention his sons in this speech because it was made in praise of womankind. But it is well known that his sons were equally as dutiful and attached to their father as his daughters were.
Nowhere did a more generous or genial hospitality abound than at Darrynane. There indeed every stranger found a ready chair, and jests and pranks never failed, though it is not many mournful tales were told in that delightful circle.
No. 7, Monday, December i^th, 1795. — I went to bed last night at a quarter before twelve, and got up this morning at a quarter before nine. I have finished my letter to my uncle, and read thirty-two pages in Gibbon — 164.
I am just going off to London, so that the transactions of this will afford subject for part of to-morrow's number (r).
{r) There is no " to-morrow's number," for reasons explained in that of the i6th. The only transaction recorded is his visit to the play at Drury Lane.
No. 8, Wednesday, December 16th, 1795. — I would have written something yesterday but for the reason
84 DANIEL O'CONNELL
which I am going to mention. After returning from town I put it off for a while, then deferred it till after supper. I found it oppress me as a dis- agreeable task. It in fact occasioned the same sensations which I used to feel when, formerly, I intended on a [particular] day to go to confession. Now I mean that this Journal should give me only pleasure and profit. Therefore I resolved not to write anything last night, as I felt writing a burthen.
In the foregoing paragraph I have expressed myself very ill. I have not said what I meant. Tha"^ I shall do the same now seems to me scarce doubtful. There is a kind of cold hanging about me these two days which dulls [7] my faculties. Besides, my trip to town has put me very much out of sorts. It has damaged my plans of study, and I do not yet feel myself quite at home again. I will go to town as seldom as possible, since I feel the pernicious effects attending my journeys thither. They are productive of no benefit ; yet they make me spend a great deal of money.
I went to the play on Monday night at Drury Lane Theatre. The tragedy of Alexander the Great was acted, with the farce of The Devil to Pay. I did not on the whole admire the acting. Kemble, who played Alexander, does not give many of the lines the smoothness for which, and for which alone, many of them are remarkable. Let me instance the lines beginning with
" When Glory like the dazzling eagle stood,"
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lines which contain a tissue of false, unmeaning, or exaggerated images. There is, indeed, a smooth flow of numbers in them pleasing to the ear. To render them palatable, they should receive from the speaker this the only beauty they possess. Now Kemble, on the contrary, pronounces them as if they consisted of a number of disjointed half- sentences. In the mad scene he was too tame. In the cold fit which the poison occasions he puff[ed] and blew, and swelled his cheeks to puff and blow, in a manner that was truly pantomimic, and highly ridiculous.
Mrs. Siddons, I find, is not much admired in the character of Roxana. It is not, in my opinion, because the part ill suits her style of playing. The strength and modulation of her voice render any character doubly interesting in her hands. With our modern actors it is no small difliculty to under- stand the dialogue of a tragedy. But Mrs. Siddons has the faculty of making herself clearly understood in every part. And to this faculty, I conceive, she owes no small share of her high estimation. Binsley in Clytus was more chaste than he usually is. The character seems adapted to his manner of acting. That stern gravity of the veteran Greek was happily displayed. As for Charles Kemble, I believe he possesses no other requisite for a theatrical hero than a large stock of impudence. And impudence unaccompanied by merit is [8] not very captivating in any
86 DANIEL O'CONNELL
condition. Miss Miller will, in my opinion, be a good actress (s).
(s) The tragedy of Alexander the Great is by Nathaniel Lee. The Devil to Pay ; or, The Wives Metamorphosed, is by Colley Gibber in collaboration with others. The lines commencing
" When Glory like the dazzling eagle stood "
are as follows : —
" When Glory like the dazzling eagle stood, Perched on ray beaver in the Granick flood, When Fortune's self my standard trembling bore. And the pale fates stood frighted on the shore, When each immortal on the billows rode, And I myself appeared the leading god."
" The Granick flood " was, of course, the water of the river Granicus.
O'Connell's criticism of Kemble's elocution is all the more curious and interesting as Kemble is generally reputed to have excelled in declamation, and to have had a fine sense of rhythm, but to have been deficient in fire and passion. The embryo orator was not likely to have erred in his judg- ment, and the contrast which he draws between the elocution of Mrs. Siddons and that of her brother shows that he was well able to discriminate between the excellence of the one and the faultiness of the other. Charles Kemble was a younger brother of John Philip Kemble, mentioned above. He was born in the same year as O'Connell, and was therefore only in his twenty-first year when O'Connell saw him play on this occasion. He too had been at Douay, but on his return to England obtained a situation in the Post Office, which, how- ever, he soon resigned to go on the stage. The defects which O'Connell observed were probably due to his youth and inexperience, for he ultimately became a very finished actor, playing such parts as Doricourt, Charles Surface, Antony, and Henry V. with considerable success. It was during John Philip Kemble's management of Drury Lane that Vortigern,
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mentioned in No. 40, was produced. Miss Miller, whose name O'Connell mentions here with approval, played Rowena on that memorable occasion.
The plot of The Devil to Pay turns on the transformation by a magician of the shrewish lady of Sir John Loverule into the good-natured but ill-used wife of Jobson, the village cobbler, and the retransformation of both into their original forms, after a short experience of their novel surroundings, resulting in the reformation of the lady and the cobbler, and the happiness of their households. The play, though rather coarse in parts, is amusing enough. It went through several editions, one of which was printed in Dublin.
I read this day and last night eighty-five pages of Ossian's Poems (f), one hundred and eight pages of Godwin's Political Justice (u), and two hundred and thirty-four of Pindar's Poems (v).
(t) Further references to Macpherson's Ossian will be found in Nos. 27 and 40, from the former of which it appears that O'Connell was familiar from infancy with the names of the heroes mentioned in the poems, and from the latter that he disbelieved in the authenticity of the poems.
(m) This work, the full title of which is The Inquiry concerning Political Justice and its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness, was published in 1793. It was written by William Godwin, who was the son of a Nonconformist minister, a man of the strictest Calvinistic principles and practice. William Godwin at first followed his father's profession, and joined the Sandemanians, the straitest sect of the Calvinists. While officiating at Stowmarket, however, the writings of the French reformers were brought under his notice, and these under- mined his religious opinions. In 1 782 he published six sermons under the title Sketches of History, in one of which he laid down the proposition that " God Himself has no right to be a tyrant." His work on Political Justice had a profound influence
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on the thought of his own and the succeeding generation. By political justice he meant " the adoption of any principle of morality and truth into the practice of the community." His doctrines were of the most far-reaching character. Monarchy he considered a species of government unavoidably corrupt. All control of man by man he considered more or less intolerable. He looked forward to the time when each man, doing what seemed right in his own eyes, would also be doing what was best for the community, because all would be guided by the principles of pure reason. He was opposed to all punishments, to accumulated property, and to marriage. It was with difficulty that he was induced to go through the ceremony when, in 1796, he was married to Mary Wolstone- craft, whose work on The Rights of Woman was one of those read by O'Connell, and of whom some particulars will be found below (p. loi). Godwin wrote her memoirs, under the title of Memoirs of the Rights of Woman, published in 1794. As a novelist he will be best remembered as the author of Caleb Williams; or, Things as they ar^, mentioned below (p. 122). The Government of Earl Grey conferred on him the office of Yeoman of the Usher of the Exchequer. He died in 1836 in the residence in Palace Yard attached to that office.
(v) Pindar, a lyric poet of ancient Greece, born about 522 b.c. His versatility was so great as to be recorded by Horace (Carm. iv. 2). Numerous fragments of his compositions have been preserved, but the only complete work of his that has come down to us is The Epinicia, or Odes of Victory, com- memorating successes in the great games. From the fact that O'Connell seldom quoted poetry in his speeches it has been inferred that he had no appreciation of it (Macdonagh, p. 373). But men of his abounding eloquence have little need of such adventitious ornament, and one who could at one sitting read two hundred and thirty-four pages of Pindar or six hundred lines of Paradise Lost, as he tells us he did on June ist, 1802, could not have been quite dead to the beauties of poetic composition. That the verses he wrote himself " hardly entitle him to a place even among the very
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minor bards " (ib.) may be admitted ; but those which Mr. Macdonagh quotes had a personal and a patriotic interest which made them suitable both to the occasions upon which they were quoted and the audiences for whom they were intended. The lines which Mr. Macdonagh refers to as having been often repeated in O'Connell's repeal speeches, and as having been quoted against him in the speech of the Attorney- General during the State trials of 1844, were calculated to strike a responsive chord in the breasts of his hearers : —
" O Erin, shall it e'er be mine To right thy wrongs in battle line, To raise my victor hand and see Thy hills, thy dales, thy people, free ? That glance of bliss is all I crave Between my labours and my grave."
It is easy to understand Mr. Macdonagh's estimate of O'Connell's taste for literature when we read the following passage, which occurs on p. 23. Speaking of the Journal, he says, " His reading consisted of Blackstone's Commentaries, Coke on Littleton, and Espinasse's Nisi Prius, and outside these law books the Bible and Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." The list of works mentioned in the Journal which is given in the Introduction {supra, "p. vi.) shows that this statement is a serious error. Moreover, we know from the entry under date December 12th, 1795, that all the works O'Connell read were not recorded in his Journal, and no doubt he read much in the intervals during which the keeping of the Journal was suspended. That he was not deficient in the poetic sentiment is evident from a beautiful letter to Walter Savage Landor describing the romantic scenery in the midst of which his childhood was passed, which contains an exquisite passage in prose that rises to the height of poetry. That letter, like several others, contains a poetic quotation, and he not only admired, but knew by heart, and often recited, Moore's melodies (Personal Recollections, i. 150), which he considered to have done good service to the cause of Ireland. His criticism on Cowley, that " he never wrote to the heart," shows that he understood
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wherein lay the essence of real poetry, as opposed to lines merely composed in metre, and ending in rhyme.
No. 9, Tuesday, December 2gth, 1795. — Near a fortnight has elapsed since the last number was written. A transaction took place during the interval which prevented me from continuing this Journal with regularity. I allude to my quarrel with Douglas Thompson, the son of a porter- brewer of Chyswick. The circumstances of the quarrel I am going to relate.
On Thursday, the 17th instant, I made one of a large party which was entertained by General Morrison at his house in Hammersmith. I went thither early in the evening, accompanied by a Mrs. Atkinson and Miss King. At about half after eleven Mrs. A. sent me from the dining- room to call Miss K. She took my hand, when D. Thompson, who sat next to her, seized the hand of hers that was disengaged and led her out of the room. So soon as he returned I went up to him and told him in an undertone, " You have behaved in a rascally manner to me, and you shall hear about it." He replied, " I tell you what, sir : if we were not at General Morrison's, I would see which of us should quit the room first." While I was at breakfast on Friday morning I received a most impertinent letter, requiring my reason for calling him a rascal {w). As Bennett was married so lately, I had no one to send ; I therefore went
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myself. We canvassed the subject standing at the street door of his father's house. After some conversation he rushed in for a cane, with which he struck me three times. I seized him, and though I had a heavy cane in my hand, I did not return the blow. On Saturday morning I sent Bennett with a message. Thompson, under pre- tence of agreeing to a meeting, detained him until the father [gj had procured a constable, who took Bennett up. I went to the magistrate, and was then obliged to give security that I would keep the peace. The General came down the next day, and became my bondsman.
( w) The letter is in the following terms : —
" To Danl. O'Connell.
" Chiswick, December iSth, 1795. " Sir, — Unless you make a point of disclosing to me the reason of your expressions last night, I shall most certainly look upon and treat you as everyone deserves who deviates so much from the character and manners of a gentleman. Depend upon it, nothing but the idea of the mortification it would have been to General Morrison prevented me from treating you at that moment as you justly deserved.
" I am, etc.,
" Douglas Thompson."
Thompson was one of the party at the Pack Horse men- tioned in No. 24. The sequel to this quarrel will be found described in subsequent numbers. Macdonagh {Life of Daniel O'Connell, p. 26) speaks of the dispute with Douglas Thompson as having arisen at a tavern bar in the village. He is very severe on O'Connell for involving himself in such vulgar brawls, and wasting his money, while he was writing dutiful letters to his uncle. But the imbroglio after the wine party at
D.C. I
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the Pack Horse was not of O'Connell's making ; he merely stood by his friend. Thompson's letter is given by Fitz- patrick {Correspondence, vol. i.). Chiswick knoweth the name of Thompson — as brewing there — no more. The General referred to in this entry is, no doubt, Count O'Connell, and not General Morrison.
No. 10, Wednesday, December 30th, 1795. — D. Thompson is much my inferior in stature (x) and in strength. I did not, however, return his blow when he struck me. My conduct in this instance was guided by two considerations. First, I appre- hended putting a period to his existence. This apprehension was founded on the consciousness of my superior strength and of the weight of my cane. Secondly, I bore in mind the transaction with De Faria's servant and its consequent expences, troubles, and inconveniencies (y). In other words, having no witnesses, I was afraid of the law.
(x) According to the prison register at Richmond Peniten- tiary, reproduced in The Liberator: his Life and Times (p. 724), O'Connell was five feet eleven inches and three-quarters in height.
{y) De Faria was Mrs. Rigby's landlord (see No. 12). The incident is described in No. 24 (p. 120).
I reflect with pleasure on the courage which I felt on this occasion. All I have to fear is precipitation in plunging myself in future quarrels. I know that duelling is a vice ; yet there is a certain charm in the independence which it bestows on a man that endears it even to many thinking minds. I
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have, however, made a resolution not to fight a duel from the time that I become independent of the world. The General has vouchsafed to become one of my securities ; Bennett {z) is the other. The message and consequent actions of Messrs. Thompson took place on Saturday. The General did not come down until the next day. In the interval I received a great deal of civility from Mr. Reed, the justice of peace, and a butcher of Hammersmith, with whose name I am not acquainted. This butcher is one of the headboroughs. He liberated me, first on the security of Mrs. Rigby, and afterwards on my own word. The General scolded me very much. He divided his sermon into many parts. He commented on my impropriety of returning to Chyswick [lo] after having been once before engaged in a scrape there {a), as if my once having been unlucky in a certain place portended future evils to attend me in that place. He spoke of my folly in being a democrat, of my absurdity in displaying my political opinions. He railed at me for not having returned the blow. Now, if I had struck Thompson, he certainly would have blamed me as much, if not more. He then would say with justice that there was a more gentlemanlike method of revenging an injury than that of fighting with cudgels like common porters, etc., etc., etc.
{z) The General is Count O'Connell. Bennett is Richard Newton Bennett, so often mentioned in the Journal, (o) The Middleton affair (see No. 24, p. 120).
I 2
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A sketch of the character of some of my fellow- lodgers and some of my acquaintance may perhaps at a future period be amusing. The drawing, or attempt at drawing, it must be of present utility. These arguments justify in my mind the enter- prize. I shall preface the characters with a description of the situation, etc., of the house.
This house fronts the Thames, and commands a view of Barnes at the one side, and of the Margrave of Ansbach's house and improvements at the other {b). An island covered with reeds and osiers lies opposite the door, and extends to some length both ways. Nothing can be better calculated for a lodging-house than this is. The apartments are extensive and unconnected. Each inmate is as much alone as if in possession of a separate house.
(b) The house is still standing, and is called Walpole House. It is a handsome edifice. A description of the interior is given in O'Connell's letter to his uncle of December loth, 1795, quoted above (p. 72). It is said to have been the house in which Miss Pinkerton kept the academy in which Becky Sharp taught. If so, the " enamelled iron gates " are still there. Walpole House is now the residence of Mr. Beerbohm Tree, the well- known actor.
Mrs. Rigby, who rents the house, at first kept a school in it. But about five years ago, on the death of a sister who assisted, she commenced taking in lodgers. All those who lodge in the house board there likewise. At least an instance
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to the contrary never reached my knowledge. Mrs. Rigby is about forty-five years of age. * * * Nature, so penurious in the gifts of form and feature, has given her a strong mind, a clear com- prehension [ii], and a tenacious memory. Her faculties are cultivated by an almost universal study. She speaks French. She understands and speaks Italian. She speaks French correctly, though without a great fluency or a proper accent. She has some acquaintance with the Latin tongue. Many branches of history are familiar to her. Her knowledge of players, ancient and modern, of the dramatic and poetic works in the English language, and of the private lives of their authors, is extensive. Of the peerage of England her mind is a register. The profession of her father, a coach-painter, enabled her without difficulty to acquire skill in heraldry.
Mrs. Hunter desired me insert in my Journal an observation of her daughter. It is " that in fifty years I would doubt whether I was a man or a cabbage-stump, so much was I inclined to scepticism " (c).
(c) Mrs. Hunter was a boarder at Mrs. Rigby's (see No. 15). It is noticeable that O'Connell does not repudiate the charge of scepticism. In the extracts from the Journal printed in'the Irish Monthly the word " suspicion " is substituted for " scepti- cism." But there is no doubt but that the word is not " suspicion," which would be meaningless, but " scepticism." The asterisks replace a passage in which poor Mrs. Rigby's personal appearance is very unfiatteringly described.
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No. II, Thursday, December 31s/, 1795. — With this day the year closes. How fleet has it been in its progress, how rapid in its course ! It seemed to commence but yesterday, and, behold, it already is no more. A few more such years, and the scene will close on me. I, who now write, who now think, who now move with strength and velocity, shall be stretched, pale, motionless, inanimate. My mind now can grasp in its comprehension the million of
"... adamantine spheres Rolling unshaken through the void immense " (Akenside, Pleasures of Imagination).
It can descend from this elevation either gradually or with one bold stride to the minute insect that escapes the eye of the microscope. What is to become of this comprehensive mind ? The body placed in a solitary corner, a prey to worms and vermin, soon will restore to the elements the portions of each which it has absorbed, I should rather say of which it is composed. But the mind, the mind ! Through what variety of untried being is that to roam ? What changes is it to suffer ? Does it perish as a dependant on the corporal system ? Such are the questions to the solution of which the light of reason cannot direct the inquirer. Reason faintly glimmers [12] on futurity, or perhaps, did not prejudice vitiate our senses, we should perceive that reason affords no light to enable us to discover whether the mind is immortal or not. Of things
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not arrived we can only guess. Our best surmises are founded on an analogy. Now, what analogy can there be between any part of corporal existence and the state of the mind when separated from the body, supposing separation actually takes place ? This subject may afford matter for further speculation.
I read this day twelve pages of " E. N. P.," about forty pages of Godwin and as many of Gibbon, and five pages of Para's Physique Experimentale. For some days past I have not inserted what I read. It was not because I was idle these days.
No. 12, Friday, January ist, 1796. — The closing year yesterday put me in mind of the close of life, and made me reflect on the consequences. This day gives me an opportunity of speculating on the prospects of youth, but particularly the prospects which my situation and, much more, my imagina- tion present [to] me. I am not, however, in a fit humour for descanting on such topics. In a future number, perhaps, I may engage in some attempts to analyse my opinions on these subjects.
I read this day twelve pages of *' E. N. P.," about forty pages of Godwin, fifty of Gibbon, and six- teen of Para. (In continuation, see p. [n].) Mrs. Rigby is a most violent and inveterate democrat, as well as a deist. Her own misfortunes make [her] peevish on these subjects. But, with all her informa- tion, she has not a grain of common prudence. The servants neglect their business, plunder and
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cheat her. De Faria has served her with notice to quit this house on the twenty-fifth of March. This will inevitably be her ruin. Yet while she should be exerting herself to procure another house she is talking of Beaumont and Fletcher's plays, descanting [13] on Paine's Age of Reason (d), or arguing on the politics of the day. She seems in general to study the ease and convenience of servants rather than of her lodgers. Her authority is therefore gone. In her attachment for cats she becomes foolish and absurd. But she has a greater failing than any yet mentioned. It is a fondness for liquor. She gets drunk sometimes, and would in all probability do it oftener were she unrestrained by the fear of her lodgers forsaking the house. She is at all times familiar, but when heated with drinking she is rude in her familiarities.
(d) O'Connell became himself a student of this work. His opinion upon it will be found in No. 20.
No. 13, Saturday, January 2nd, 1796. — I shall now conclude my character of Mrs. Rigby with observing that, though possessed of a comprehen- sive and cultivated mind, she is deficient, in many respects, in common decorum and cleanliness.
I this day received a letter from Maurice, dated at Carhen on the 21st ulto. He is extremely irritated against the General (^). It would be extremely improper in me to inform the latter
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of the opinion on his conduct which the letter contains. However, I will behave with prudence and firmness on the occasion. I will not deny having the letter, nor will I show it. It would be well for me if I could follow the same method of conducting myself at all times. And why should I not ? It is necessary for this purpose only to weigh well each action before I commence it.
(e) Maurice was O'Connell's brother, whose death is recorded below (p. 233). The General is Count O'Connell. Carhen was the residence of O'Connell's father. The letter was not asked for (see below, p. 104).
I am not en train for deep speculation, neither am I fit for gaiety or vivacity. What I write must be dull and lifeless, void of sense as of wit.
I this day read the usual quantity of " E. N. P.," sixteen pages of Godwin, about ninety pages of Gibbon, 3rd volume, and thirty of Bootees Historical Account of a Suit at Law. This work will in future be mention[ed] under the title " B. S. L." I read like- wise some passages of The Manual of Liberty (to be contracted in future numbers to "M. L.") and 122 pages of Hugh Trevor to Miss Hunter (/) [14]. The Memorial of Liberty is composed of quotations from different authors, which quotations contain argu- ments to demonstrate the folly, or ridicule, to show the absurdities, of many of the existing political institutions. The confused, exaggerated, or false representations which crafty tyranny invents in
loo DANIEL O'CONNELL
support of these institutions, and blind prejudice receives, are dangerous to the Hberty — that is, to the happiness — of mankind. The book in question suppHes arguments to combat and convince even prejudice, and must therefore be useful in propa- gating the cause of truth {g).
(/) Miss Hunter was blind (see below, p. 105). The work here referred to is The Adventures of Hugh Trevor, by Thomas Holcroft. They are supposed to be told by Hugh Trevor himself. It is well written. The characters are vigorously drawn. There is a parson who entertains an inordinate opinion of the dignity of his cloth, and is eaten up with family pride. There is a squire who detests him., and upon one occasion shows his dislike by insisting that he shall receive payment of tithe of rats, as well as other produce of the estate, an incident which leads to a scuffle in which the Church is not only militant, but, with the assistance of Hugh, triumphant also. There is Hugh's father, a gentleman farmer, who is a capital judge of a horse, and hunts with the county magnates. There is a college tutor, who is treated with contumely by the young squire, and so on through several volumes of not unentertaining matter.
(g) The Manual of Liberty ; or, Testimonies in behalf of the Rights of Mankind, published in 1795. It is later on referred to erroneously as The Memorial of Liberty. The compiler quotes from Godwin, Burke, Rousseau, Voltaire, Bolingbroke, Machiavelli, Swift, Bacon, Shakespeare, Sterne, Goldsmith, and a number of other authors.
No. 14, Sunday, January 3r^, 1796. — I wrote this day a letter to Mr. Hobson about a proposal, or rather a request, he made me about twelve days ago. He wanted that I should join him in a post obit bond for twelve hundred pounds. A young
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man of the name of Fullarton, who boarded with Hobson, was to be the third security. At least so the latter asserted. He asserted likewise that Fullarton was bequeathed by an uncle thirty thousand pounds. Now, Fullarton is only seven- teen. He may die before he comes of age. After he comes of age he may refuse to pay on a plea of nonage. Hobson may, and I suppose he will, become a bankrupt ; so thus I would possibly be saddled with the debt. Add to this, the chance of this transaction coming to my uncle's knowledge would (had I been concerned in it) be a source of continual anxiety and apprehension. Of course I have declined in the most unqualified manner having anything to do with the business.
Let me now make a few observations on this affair. In the first place, Hobson must, in all probability, be either a fool or a knave, or perhaps both. He must be a fool to engage to pay twelve hundred pounds by a deed on which he could not possibly, as far as I can judge of the matter, get above three or four hundred, that is if he meant to discharge the engagement ; and if he did not, he must be a knave. As for my own part, I blame myself for not giving an unequivocal denial to the proposal the moment it was made. I have given Hobson expectation of doing that which I never had any intention of doing. As for Hobson, he has neither information [15] nor worth to induce me to continue his acquaintance. The line of
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conduct which this fact bids me follow is obvious. Felix McCarthy (/^) now lives entirely at Hobson's. An intimacy with this man may be dangerous. I must therefore shun him.
(h) Felix McCarthy was probably O'Connell's cousin.
I read to-day eighty pages of Gibbon, third volume, and sixty-three pages of The Rights of Women (Wolstonecraft). This work may, if perused with attention, be very useful. It is calculated to open the road to truth by clearing away prejudice. That the present system of female education is miserably erroneous, that mind has no sex, and that women are unjustly enslaved, are opinions I have long entertained. What portion of power in the government of the world ought to be entrusted to the female sex is a question which I cannot decide. However, Godwin has in some measure made up [my] mind on the subject by proving that government to be best which laid fewest restraints on private judgment. Surely the judgment of the one sex ought to be as unshackled as that of the other (i).
(») The work here referred to is A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which appeared in 1792. In it the authoress argued in favour of equality of education, and united education for boys and girls. The main argument of the work, as she states herself in the dedication to Talleyrand, was built on the simple principle that if woman were not prepared by education to become the companion of man, she would stop the progress of knowledge, for truth must be common to all, or it will be inefficacious with respect to its influence on general practice. She held up to scorn the educationists of the school of
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Rousseau and Dr. Gregory, who taught that the whole duty of woman was to make herself agreeable to man, and be his willing slave ; that for the purpose of captivating him she should cultivate a high degree of sensibility. Mary Wolstone- craft, who had been a governess, and had at one time kept a school in conjunction with her sisters, held the very opposite view. Girls should be brought up to be strong and healthy, should have plenty of outdoor exercise, and not merely the formal walk in procession to which the schoolgirl was generally confined. She anticipated the kindergarten system in her suggestions for the education of the very young, and she advocated women's suffrage and their admission into the medical profession. Her views naturally excited strong oppo- sition, more especially as they were those of a woman who had answered Burke's Refiections on the French Revolution. Horace Walpole, in a letter to Hannah More, refers to her as " that hyaena in petticoats." Her views on marriage were lax, and she was in favour of greater facilities for divorce. She unfortunately formed an intimacy with a Captain Imlay, who deserted her after the birth of a daughter, Fanny, who after her mother's death poisoned herself, at the age of twenty-two. As mentioned above (p. 87), Mary Wolstonecraft afterwards married Godwin. They had one child, Mary, who married Percy Bysshe Shelley. Mrs. Godwin died a short time after her confinement, on September loth, 1797, and was buried in the churchyard of Old St. Pancras ; but her remains were afterwards removed by Sir Peter Shelley to the churchyard of St. Peter's, Bournemouth. Shelley, in his dedication of The Revolt of Islam to his wife, refers to her mother, and her father also, in the following stanza : —
" They say that thou wert lovely from thy birth. Of glorious parents thou aspiring child : I wonder not, for one then left this earth Whose life was like a setting planet mild. Which clothed thee in the radiance undefiled Of its departing glory ; still her fame Shines on thee through the tempests dark and wild Which shake these latter days ; and thou canst claim The shelter from thy sire of an immortal name."
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The Vindication of the Rights of Woman was finished in six weeks. As might be expected, it exhibits marks of this haste. O'Connell criticises the work in No. 23 below (p. 120). But the authoress thought Httle of the graces of style in comparison with the matter of her essay. " I shall disdain to cull my phrases or polish my style," she says in the introductory chapter. " I aim at being useful, and sincerity will render me unaffected." As Kegan Paul remarks in his collected edition of her letters, " her opinions have become in many particulars the commonplaces of our own day, while she who first proclaimed what is now held innocently was forgotten or assailed." Some of her maxims deserve to be remembered, such, for example, as these : " Make the heart clean, and give the head employment " ; "A slavish bondage to parents cramps every faculty of the mind"; " If children are to be educated to understand the true principles of patriotism, the mother must be a patriot." Those who are interested in the life and work of this remarkable woman will derive a vast amount of infor- mation from Emma Rauschenbusch-Clough's Study of Mary Wolstonecraft and the Rights of Women.
No. 15, Tuesday, January ^th, 1796. — I was in town yesterday, and did not return until late in the evening. The General did not ask for Maurice's letter (j).
(J) See No. 13, p. 78.
I went to bed last night at one o'clock, and got up this morning at eight. My watch was at the maker's this some days past. This [is] the reason of my omitting the insertion of the hours of going to bed and rising. I will no longer insert the number of pages which I read each day ; I shall content
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myself with setting down the day I begin and the day I end each book. From this rule I will except my law study. I have already resolved to read twelve pages a day of " E. N. P." Should I fail in this article, I will remark it in order that the insertion of one fault may serve to admonish me and prevent a repetition.
I shall for the future draw at least one character each week. Unless I thus limited myself to some fixed period, I should be putting off the execution of the project from day to day until it was no longer time.
Mrs. Hunter is the widow of a gentleman who resided in Rhode Island, on the coast of North America. She came to England about five [16] years since. Three daughters and a son, the whole of her family, accompanied her. The journey to Europe was undertaken for the purpose of con- sulting oculists on a disorder which had deprived the eldest daughter of sight. I do not now recollect whether this was pointed out to me by some person as the object of the journey, or whether I drew the conclusion myself from circumstances with which I have become acquainted. The son entered in the Temple, kept terms there, and is now practising at the American bar. He bears a very good, I should say excellent, character. Application and ability are its leading features. The two younger daughters are married, and, I believe, to advantage. The elder certainly has got a capital match. They are
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both fine women ; but the younger of them is truly beautiful. I never was so struck by female beauty as by hers. (To be continued.)
I last night begun the Life of Dr. Johnson by Arthur Murphy {k). This is reckoned the best Life of Johnson extant. He neither fatigues by the recital of trifles into which Boswell, Mrs. Piozzi, etc., descend ; and still it is so managed as not to disgust by a mere list of dates. Mr. Murphy is now sitting at tea with Mrs. Hunter in the room beneath that in which I write. He is a very agreeable, lively old man ; and looks extremely well, though at the age of seventy-five. He was attentive to me when I was here last year. He once attempted to argue me out of my democratic opinions. But he handled the subject very ill ; and, indeed, gave me several arguments against the propositions which he endeavoured to establish. However, I was not permitted to make use of any arguments. He kept the debate entirely to himself, and so of course had it all his own way.
ik) An Essay on the Life and Genius of Samuel fohnson, published in 1792. Murphy, as he states himself, " enjoyed the conver- sation and friendship of that excellent man more than thirty years." That partiality which he shows to the subject of his essay (see below, p. 114) may be accounted for by this long acquaintance.
I got the second volume of Godwin's Political Justice from Cawthorne's Library last night. I
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have this day read some chapters of it. I admire this work more, beyond comparison more, than any I ever met with. It has enlarged and strengthened my understanding, and infused into my mind a serenity never before enjoyed. In other words, it has made me a happier, and, I think, a better, man. I probably shall at another period give my sentiments concerning the book more at large (/).
(/) See p. 119.
I forgot to add to the paragraph in which I men- tioned Mr. Murphy that his civility did not put on an air of coldness towards me until after my quarrel with D. Thompson (m). To the Thompson family Murphy is extremely attached. To me he is still very civil.
(m) See No. 9 above, p. 90.
No. 16, Wednesday, January 6th, 1796.