occasionally.[1] I was charmed with the gay independent life he led. He showed me O'Connell at the Corn Exchange, and Plunket and Bushe at the Four Courts; took me to theatres and public meetings in the evening, and allowed me to browse at intervals of leisure on a harvest of periodicals scattered through his sitting-room, the like of which I had never seen. But above all, the little lectures he gave me over his mahogany on current politics often appeared next morning as a leading article, and I, who dreamed I had something to say, longed for such a marvellous method of communicating with the people. I was fascinated, and determined to become a journalist. My guardian, whom I had accompanied to Dublin, opened negotiations with Michael Staunton, the proprietor of the Morning Register, a daily paper founded a dozen years earlier by the Catholic Association. He had no vacancy, but he was willing to take me as a tyro, to be trained in journalism, who could afterwards get employment if he proved fit for it. Early in April, 1836, when I was just twenty years of age, I set out anew for Dublin, my friend, Terence MacManus, accompanying me, as he also obtained employment in one of the monster shops which were then beginning to be founded by adventurous Scotsmen; Henry MacManus had preceded us by a few weeks and was now resident in the metropolis, and Mat Trumble had become usher in an English school.
Before I left Monaghan the monotony of provincial life was interrupted by an event which produced a prodigious clamour in Parliament and the Press, but is now altogether forgotten. It was, however, of genuine, even of historic, importance. The Lord Lieutenant, Lord Mulgrave, made a tour in Ulster, and, for the first time since the capitulation of Limerick, the representative of the Sovereign received Catholics and Protestants on perfectly equal terms. He employed the royal prerogative in favour of prisoners whose term of detention was nearly completed, or whose conduct in prison justified clemency. This was an unheard-of procedure, and TyrConnell O'Mulgrave, the Orange Press declared, was clearing the
- ↑ Among them were "Revelations of Spain," "The Ocean Flower, a Poem," "The Biliad, a Satire," "The London Charevari, a Monthly Magazine," which preceded Punch, and was illustrated by John Leech.
