threaded his way through the forests that guard the entrance to Nepaul, turned the enemy's entrenchments, and conquered a peace (1816). For his achievements in the Nepaulese war he was created a baronet, and received the thanks of parliament. After many other labours and achievements, military and civil, he died at Meerut in July, 1825, having passed half a century in the active service of the company.—F. E.
OCKLEY, Simon, a distinguished scholar and historian, was born at Exeter in 1678. He entered Queen's college, Cambridge, 1696, and, animated by the example of Pococke and Prideaux, assiduously applied himself to oriental languages. He took orders, and through the influence of Bishop Patrick was presented by Jesus college to the vicarage of Swavesy in Cambridgeshire. He married early, and the expenses of his family involved him in debt and difficulties; he, nevertheless, pursued his investigations into oriental philology and antiquities with the utmost enthusiasm. In 1706 he published a work entitled "Introductio ad linguas Orientales," dedicated to his patron, the bishop of Ely, in which he earnestly urged the claims of eastern languages on the attention of candidates for holy orders. In 1707 he translated from the Italian the History of the Present Jews, a work by Leo Modena, a Venetian rabbi. In 1711 he was chosen professor of Arabic at Cambridge. In 1708 he had published the first volume of his great work, the "History of the Saracens;" the second appeared in 1718, when he was in prison for debt. This work, which first taught the world that there were other heroes besides those of Greece and Rome, was compiled from Arabic MSS. in the Bodleian library at Oxford. It commences at the death of Mahomet, and brings down the history to the year 705. It is full of curious and interesting information, highly esteemed for its general accuracy, and remarkable for the dramatic ability with which it is written. Gibbon has made considerable use of it in his Decline and Fall. This work seems to have brought little profit to Ockley, for he still remained a prisoner in Cambridge castle, from which he stoically dates one of his productions. He was employed by Bolingbroke to translate letters from the government of Morocco to our court; but though the whole amount for which he was confined was about £200, no one held out a hand to help the learned enthusiast. How he obtained his release is not known, but it must have been shortly after the publication of his second volume. He died in 1720. As a linguist he has been seldom excelled; he was acquainted with French, Spanish, Italian, &c.—D. G.
O'CONNELL, Daniel, the celebrated Irish agitator, was born on the 6th of August, 1775, at his father's residence, Carhen, near Cahireiveen, Kerry. He was the eldest of ten children, and his father was a landed proprietor "in receipt of a good income." At fifteen he was sent to finish his education at the well-known college at St. Omer, where he rose to the first place. The president of the college. Dr. Stapelton, writing of the young O'Connell in January, 1792, expressed himself thus:—"I never was so much mistaken in my life as I shall be, unless he be destined to make a remarkable figure in society." The French revolution forced him to return to Britain, and he reached Calais on the very day of Louis XVI.'s execution. Entering himself as a student of law at Lincoln's inn in 1794, he was at that time, he used to say, "nearly a tory at heart," disgusted as he had been by the excesses of the French revolutionists. O'Connell was a diligent student; and admitted to the Irish bar in 1798, he soon began to make way in his profession. In the Irish rebellion of that year, he not only held aloof from the United Irishmen, but was a member of the volunteer corps known as "the lawyers' artillery," and throughout his long career as an agitator, he never forgot the early lesson then emphatically taught him—always eschewing an appeal to physical force. He was already a barrister of some note when, in the January of 1800, he organized a public meeting at Dublin to oppose the legislative union of Ireland with Great Britain, which was formally effected in the ensuing July. Major Sirr, with a small force, appeared on the scene to break up the meeting; but everything under O'Connell's management was regular and orderly, so that its proceedings were allowed to be duly carried to their close. During the Irish insurrection of 1803, known as Emmett's, O'Connell served in the volunteer or "lawyers' infantry;" but the circumstances attending the repression of that outbreak were of a kind to inflame discontent, and to inspire with new ambition the anti-unionists of 1800. From this time, while his eloquence, talents, and knowledge of law were more and more advancing him to the front rank of his profession, all the three became as conspicuous in his advocacy of the catholic claims, and it was not long before he was recognized as the chief Irish champion of emancipation. In 1810, with his co-operation, a cry for repeal of the union was blended with that for catholic emancipation; but the latter question he had the prudence to place in the foreground of his agitation. In 1815 occurred his duel with Mr. D'Esterre, a member of the Dublin corporation, who resented the epithet of "beggarly," which O'Connell applied to that body; and the champion of the corporation died of the wound which he received in the encounter. In 1823 O'Connell founded the Catholic Association, and developed a plan for supplying it with funds through a penny subscription. Of the Irish agitation against the catholic disabilities O'Connell had been for twenty years the soul, when he determined the settlement of the question by successfully contesting the representation of county Clare in 1828. Entering the house of commons, he refused to take the oaths framed to exclude Roman catholics, and the excitement which the event produced in Ireland was so great that, afraid of civil war. Peel and Wellington yielded, and carried the emancipation act. In 1829 O'Connell, re-elected for Clare, took his seat in the house of commons. His professional income at this time was, according to his own estimate, £8000 a year; and as he relinquished it to devote himself to politics, he received (from 1833 onward) in compensation the famous "rent"—an annual subscription raised among his Irish admirers. Having in the meantime (1830) exchanged the representation of Clare for that of his native county, Kerry, in 1832 he was elected one of the members for Dublin. He was frequently in opposition to the first reform ministry of Earl Grey, and many and keen were his parliamentary duels with Mr. Stanley, now earl of Derby. After the whigs had been succeeded in office by Sir Robert Peel and his party, the former found it expedient to secure the support of O'Connell and his "tail," as the phalanx of Irish members who followed him was termed. Negotiations were entered into, and the result was the celebrated "Lichfield House compact" of 1835. O'Connell proclaimed a truce of some years with the whigs. His policy was triumphant in Ireland, and in 1838 he himself, it is said, was invited through Lord Normanby to become either Irish lord chief-baron of the exchequer, or master of the rolls. He declined the offer, and in the following year, wearied of inaction, and perhaps foreseeing the fall of the English political party with which he had associated himself, he unfurled the banner of repeal. No man probably ever exerted over a nation the influence which O'Connell's eloquence, old services, and knowledge of the Irish character now gave him in Ireland. The agitation gathered strength by the return of Sir Robert Peel to power in 1841; and in that year O'Connell was elected lord mayor of Dublin, which, we may add, he had intermitted to represent between 1835 and 1837, during that period sitting for Kilkenny, representing Dublin again from 1837 to 1841, when he was returned as member for county Cork. The repeal agitation, with its monster meetings, had become not only formidable but dangerous, when the Peel government resolved to interfere, and forbade a monster assemblage at Clontarf for the 8th of October, 1843. O'Connell gave way, but he and other leaders of the repeal movement were arrested soon afterwards, and prosecuted in Dublin. O'Connell was found guilty (February, 1844) of conspiracy, and condemned to fine and imprisonment. He was liberated in the following September, on appeal to the house of lords on a writ of error from the court below, but he was never himself again. He began to talk of substituting federalism for repeal, and in his own ranks was condemned to witness the revolt of Young Ireland, headed by Davis and Duffy, against what was considered his feeble and hesitating policy. Broken down in body and in mind, harassed by the consciousness of waning popularity, and pained by the sad spectacle of famine-stricken Ireland, he left England in the March of 1847 to pay a visit, for devotional purposes, to Rome. On his way to the Eternal City, he died at Genoa on the 5th of May, 1847. He had married in 1802 his cousin Mary, and a life of him, which has not appeared, was promised by his daughter, Mrs. Fitzgibbon. The "Life," by his son John, reaches only to 1824. Of O'Connell the man there are abundant and on the whole favourable traits, in the Personal Recollections of the late Daniel O'Connell, M.P., by William J. O'N. Daunt; 1848.—F. E.
