but it was not published; a paragraph was substituted declaring that I was not "the proprietor," which only confirmed the public belief that it was, at any rate, my organ. I caused a paragraph to be inserted in the Freeman's Journal, declaring that Mr. Gavan Duffy had "no connection whatever of any character with the Irishman, and had not any knowledge of its purpose, politics, managers, or any person or circumstance connected with it." But many of the readers of the new journal never saw this denial. Part of the disreputable game was to affect a deep interest in my fate, and articles and poems on this subject were common till I exposed the cheat, when the engine was promptly reversed. Finally Joseph Brenan and some of his associates, who had been club men, succeeded the original staff, and continued to manage it till Brenan had to fly to America for his connection with what is known as the Cappoquin Outbreak. After the revival of the Nation I explained the true state of the case, and the Irishman ended in the Insolvent Court.[1]
After the Clonmel trial visitors were excluded from Newgate, except my wife for an hour daily. No letters or papers were delivered. The only sound from the outer world that broke the solitude was the tramp of a sentinel outside my door. Books, however, were not taken away, or writing materials. This solitude struck the public imagination as appallingly desolate. But a friend who had been associated with me in the Nation understood the case better. "I envy you (he wrote) the profound tranquillity of a prison, to be alone after the stormy days of the Confederation, to have leisure for self-communion, certain that whatever may befall, it will find you prepared; that is surely peace and happiness." "Lost to virtue, lost to manly thought, lost to the nobler sallies of the soul, who thinks it solitude to be alone."
I have never, perhaps, passed periods of greater tranquillity than while I was a State prisoner. On the first occasion I was young (28 years of age) engaged in a generous struggle
- ↑ It was on this journal that a man who came to a tragic end of an infamous career in recent times, Mr. Richard Pigott, the forger of the Parnell letters, had his first employment.
