five years; and when released by the treaty of Campo-Formio, he found himself obliged to protest against the facts of the time, according to his natural tendency. His protests then, and during the whole period of the first empire, were in entire accordance with reason and integrity: and his revolutionary functions seemed to be over. The Restoration disappointed all the hopes and aspirations of his early life, and he at first retired to his country seat: but in IS 18 he appeared in the Chamber of Deputies, where he advanced claims on behalf of political liberty which were incessantly refused, till the revolution of 1830 brought the day for successful action at last. The event lay in his own hand. The old Bourbons were gone: the seat of government was vacant; and the nation expected him to propose its form of government. He called out the National Guards, and placed himself at their head, deciding, after much painful doubt, to employ them in suppressing the republican party, while he placed Louis Philippe on the throne, with the Charter in his hand. He presently repented of his course, and he is believed to have had, too late, dim glimpses of the future calamities of the country he might have launched in the only safe course. He lived less than four years from the date of that last of the failures of a long life; and the pathetic anecdote is preserved, to be reproduced hereafter in history that his last words on public affairs related to the engrossing subject of his disappointment in the King. To one leaning over him he is reported to have said, “He is a knave, and we are the victims of his knavery.” He turned his head on his pillow, and had done with the world’s politics. Such was the honest, high-hearted, but shallow-minded political revolutionist of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with his strong convictions, but conceptions dim and vague: his prevailing moods of lofty purpose, always giving way to irresolution, or perplexity, or mistake when the moment for action arrived. He had plenty of sincere homage, because he was unquestionably noble and pure in his patriotism: but he had no following, because he was no less indisputably weak in judgment, poor in knowledge, and therefore hazy in forecast.
In our century, we have seen a variety of political agitators corresponding with the transition character of the age. At this point, the broad figure, good-humoured, shrewd face, bright wig, orange pocket-handkerchief, and unlimited brogue of Daniel O’Connell will occur to us all.
O’Connell had as good a cause to agitate as Jack Cade or Rienzi. In his infancy, Roman Catholic parents in Ireland were not allowed to educate their children. The interdict was withdrawn in time to admit of his having better instructors than “the poor old hedge-schoolmaster” who taught Dan his letters: but there were plenty of grievances left to protest against: and Dan never became a cultivated man, qualified for political reasoning and judgment on a comprehensive scale. To the end of his life it was impossible for mere readers and observers to draw the line between his genuine ignorance and his false pretences; and it is probable that he could not have done it with any accuracy himself. Accustomed through life to wheedle audiences of all sorts, his habit of saying and pledging himself to whatever suited his purpose and his hearers became a second nature; and it might at any time have puzzled him more than any critic to make out how much of what he asserted as fact had been heard or read by him, and how much had been dreamed, or invented at the moment. This kind of false dealing with facts was paralleled by his dealing with feelings. He regarded himself as a providential pair of bellows, appointed to puff out gusts of emotion at any moment, in order to kindle and inflame the emotions of others: and this part he acted with wonderful persistence till the machine would work no longer. The function must have been irksome in the extreme,—at least for the last twenty years of his life; for he found, as soon as he was enabled to take a seat in parliament, that only in Ireland did he speak to a believing audience. English people liked to hear him for his fun and his genuine occasional eloquence: but no one of them ever thought of receiving what he said as true. His power in England was due to his power in Ireland, even before the spell of his agitation was broken in 1829.
O’Connell carried through the task which William Pitt and other statesmen had been unable to accomplish in nearly thirty years of suspended pledges. This was a great work: a proper title to historical fame, whatever might be the precise quality of the efforts and arts by which the aim was accomplished. He did not do it alone. He found parties already in antagonism about it. But he took up Ireland in his grasp, and flung it into the scale, to bear down royal prejudice and bad faith; and he succeeded. If he had never been heard of more, he would have taken a very high place in the order of political agitators: but he had eighteen years more to live; and he spent them in teaching the world how a restless spirit in the days of the House of Brunswick may be as mischievous as in the time of the Plantagenets. After the Emancipation Act of 1829, O’Connell’s agitation ceased to be, in his own consciousness, genuine; and all was in fact over with him. His position in regard to income was not a creditable one. It was not to be supposed that a man with a dozen children should surrender or neglect a lucrative practice at the bar in his devotion to politics; and it was perfectly right that those who desired him to devote himself to politics should take care of his income. But it was not done by rich men purchasing or conferring an annuity,—which might and should have been equal to the utmost amount that his profession could have been expected to yield him: it was done by begging all through Ireland every year, from the altar, and by the wayside, and in the inns, and at every cabin door. O’Connell kept his beagles, and supported his clan, and made all bright about him by means of the peasants’ Sunday coats, and the labourer’s second potato, and the widow’s hoarded sixpence, all levied by the priests. O’Connell never got over this. It was worse for him in England than the lies which he would have been wise to keep for Ireland, or the rank abuse and high-pressure sentiment which made his speeches unreadable in English newspapers. There was nothing real and feasible about his Repeal