O'Connell; a feeling which he himself had habitually expressed in his private correspondence with his dearest and closest friends.
"At this point the strong, self-restrained man paused from emotion, and broke into irrepressible tears. He was habitually neither emotional nor demonstrative, but he had been in a state of nervous anxiety for hours; the cause for which he had laboured so long and sacrificed so much was in peril on both hands. The Association might be broken up by the conflict with O'Connell, or it might endure a worse fate if it became despicable by suppressing convictions of public duty at his dictation. With these fears were mixed the recollection of the generous forbearance from blame and the promptitude to praise which marked his own relations to O'Connell, and the painful contrast with these sentiments presented by the scene he had just witnessed. He shed tears from the strong passion of a strong man. The leaders of the Commons of England, the venerable Coke, John Pym, and Sir John Eliot, men of iron will, wept when Charles I. extinguished the hope of an understanding between the people and the Crown. Tears of wounded sensibility choked the utterance of Fox when Burke publicly renounced his friendship. Both the public and the private motives united to assail the sensibility of Davis."[1]
Smith O'Brien and Henry Grattan again interposed, and O'Connell and Davis were induced to interchange courtesies and good wishes; but a blow was struck from which the Association never recovered. Davis's friends were enraged at the misrepresentation to which he was subjected, and at the ingratitude of O'Connell, and though sacrifices of feeling were made for the public cause the wounds inflicted bled inwardly. Peel's Bill passed without amendment, and though the Primate and the bishops of the three cities in which the institutions were planted determined to accept the new colleges, the bulk of the Catholic episcopacy withheld their sanction, and the institutions maintained only a feeble and unprosperous existence. I have since lived for five and twenty years in a country where a system existed which illustrates the wicked policy of refusing to amend a scheme of
- ↑ "Short Life of Thomas Davis." London: Fisher Unwin.
