Ireland, and was still living in exile in France. The family remained fairly well-to-do, and Feargus lived the rollicking life of a young squireen. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and was called to the Irish bar, but never practised to any extent. Of his life in Ireland O'Connor afterwards gave many fantastic accounts,[1] but there is reason to believe that it was of a somewhat lurid description.[2] In 1832 the joint influence of Daniel O'Connell and his own family procured the election of Feargus for the county of Cork. He entered Parliament as one of O'Connell's "tail." He was perhaps one of the best of a rather second-rate lot.[3] He had courage and readiness in debate and an independence of character which brought him under O'Connell's ban. At the election of 1835 he was again returned, but unseated on the ground that he was not qualified to sit—an objection which was probably as sound in 1832 as in 1835, had O'Connell seen fit to allow it to be brought forward in the earlier year. That interrupted his parliamentary career for twelve years. He settled, somewhat precariously circumstanced, no doubt, in Hammersmith, and became acquainted with English radical movements in which for a year or so he played but an ineffective rôle. The growing agitation in the manufacturing districts offered him a better chance of distinguishing himself. He toured the North in August 1836, and made the acquaintance of Stephens and Oastler, and finally followed the example of Beaumont, quitting London and fixing himself in Leeds as the proprietor of the famous Northern Star, a weekly radical paper, which first beamed on the popular political world in November 1837.
O'Connor was a big, rather handsome-looking man endowed with great physical strength and animal feelings. He was capable, especially when his mind became disordered, of incredible feats of exertion and endurance, so that as a travelling agitator he was perfectly ubiquitous. No journey was too long to undertake. As an Irishman he dearly loved a "row," and was supremely in his element in such Donnybrook affairs as the Nottingham election riot of 1842. He was well versed in all the arts of popularity, and could be all things to all men. With rough working men he was hail-fellow-well-met, but he could be dignified when it was necessary to make a more serious impression. He was almost irresistible in conversation, with his fine voice, his inexhaustible stock of anecdote, in short,
- ↑ National Instructor, 1850.
- ↑ O'Connell's Correspondence, i. 370.
- ↑ Ibid. i. 391, 412, 430.
