space to make a reputation like Vergniaud's, the inspired spokesman of a nation, able to sway the popular mind against the greatest and most trusted of his elders. When I launched the Library of Ireland, I had invited John Mitchel, as we have seen, to contribute a volume, confident he would produce an effective one, which indeed he did. He was trained by his profession to systematic work, and I bethought me of him as one fit to aid me in managing the journal, the complicated correspondence of which consumed much of my time. I made him an offer which induced him to abandon his professional clientèle for ever, and take up the perilous pursuit of a National journalist in Ireland. When he settled down to work, his character and faculties became familiar to his associates, to nearly all of whom they were before unknown. He was a man of prompt and receptive intellect and lively fancy. He was abundantly endowed with pluck, which, indeed, none of his comrades wanted. He had an imperturbable temper, and a love of business fostered by the habits of his life.[1]
Thomas Wallis was amongst Davis's trusted friends; he had been his college tutor, and sometimes suggested the audacious hypothesis that it was he who had made Davis a Nationalist. He was a man of remarkable capacity and extensive reading, but of uncertain disposition, and disposed to believe that the world owed him much more than it was ever likely to pay. He had not written in the Nation hitherto, but O'Hagan and Pigot brought him to me as an important volunteer. In the end he did not do much service to the cause, being always readier to write a letter of ten pages of admirable speculation and piquant gossip, to justify himself for having neglected to send a promised article, than to be moderately punctual, but he could be confidently counted on as a caustic and not altogether useless critic of the men who were neither idle nor negligent. It is not an uncommon
- ↑ Among the ungenerous criticisms which in Irish politics are too plentiful, nothing is more unjust or more egregiously inconsistent with his earlier declarations than what John Mitchel wrote of me in his later years in his "Jail Journal." His brother-in-law, John Martin, declared, as we shall see, and the facts of this narrative emphatically declare, that he would have lived and died a village attorney if I had not drawn him out of his obscurity and enlisted him in the national cause. For Martin's letter see page 308.
