so? It seemed as if a benign power took out of your hands every weapon and snare fabricated for my destruction, and made them the agents of your discomfiture. Whatsoever you attempted failed, and not only failed, but recoiled on you.
You prohibited my trial with Martin and O'Doherty that I might be reserved for Clonmel and the gallows; but the delay was my salvation.
You carried me from the city to the county and from the county to the city, and by your precipitous rage missed me in both.
You insisted upon transporting me without trial, and the attempt issued in carrying me from a morose and besotted judge to a calm and upright one.
Your Solicitor-General denounced me in my absence as the author of the insurrection, and an outraged jury refused to convict me on the minor charge of felonious writings. You selected me from my colleagues for special vengeance, and I alone have escaped you.
You employed a troop of literary Lazzaroni against me, and where are they now? Three of the base journals that assailed me in prison or on my release have died in disgrace and insolvency. The police spy who sought to betray me had to fly the American cities from dread of Irish vengeance, and died on the banks of the Mississippi with the arrow of an Indian in his breast.
A Christian slave led into the amphitheatre to be delivered to the wild beasts, who saw tier after tier of contemptuous faces frowning down upon him, who saw the purple of authority, the toga and the sword, staked against him, hardly fronted a more unequal and ferocious array than I the first day I was carried into Green Street. What had I to set against it except the inexhaustible sympathy and help of a few dear friends? And yet the cloud of enemies have vanished away like a theatrical show, and I am still here and free.
A wise man has elicited a moral from this struggle; may it prove the true one! "Consider yourself," Thomas Carlyle wrote me, "as a brand snatched from the burning; a providential man, saved by Heaven, for doing a man's work yet.
