THE EARLY YEARS OF O'CONNELL.* IN the opening sentences of
his introduction Dr. Houston candidly admits that at first blush this Journal is dis- appointing; "it is singularly wanting in references to the matters upon which one would naturally expect it to enlarge, O'Connell's call to the Irish Bar, his early successes, the rebellion of .1798, the Union, for example." Moreover, select passages from it, we are informed, appeared about twenty-five years ago in the Irish Monthly, and have been largely drawn upon by Mr. Macdonagh in his recently published Life of the Liberator. Dr. Houston, however, considers that though the Journal may fail to satisfy the reader's curiosity upon matters such as these, it makes up for the omission "by giving him full information as to the works which O'Connell studied between the ages of 21 and 27, that is to say, the most impressionable period of a man's life, and by letting him into the secret of the objects which O'Connell set before him and the principles by which he proposed to regulate his conduct."
We are afraid that Dr. Houston has put an exaggerated value upon his treasure-trimve. The fragmentary Journal which O'Connell kept during the time he was "eating his dinners" in London and Dublin is merely the raw material which is welcome to biographers desirous of fixing a date, of correcting a blunder, of putting a little sap into a dry generalisation, or, in Mr. Gilbert's immortal phrase, of "giving verisimilitude to a bald and otherwise unconvincing narrative." Unhappily, it has undergone this process once already, if not twice, and the third straining of the teapot produces a somewhat vapid beverage. The editor has devoted immense pains to the process of annotation, and he has put together an exhaustive and by no means uninteresting account of O'Connell's early life. But it is a compilation pure and simple from well-known authorities, some of those which are placed most largely under contribution, such as The Last Colonel of the Irish Brigade, being of quite recent publication. And though Dr. Houston has devoted immense pains to the elucidation of the allusions in his text, his instinct for rejecting the superfluous is at least defective. We hardly need to be told that Pinder was "a lyric poet of ancient Greece, born about 522 B.C. His versatility was so great as to be recorded by Horace (Carm. IV.)" The commentator would have been more profitably employed in ascertaining the fact that the hero of the " Honied " did not spell his name "Roll."
One of O'Connell's main objects in keeping a journal was to preserve a record of his daily studies, and to keep himself more firmly set in the path of self-improvement. The amount of his reading is, to say the least, respectable, and vindicates him from the charge of an ill-spent youth. It was his habit to jot down the occurrences that impressed him most ; they are often the driest facts, the accessions of Kings and the dates of battles, but now and then there occurs a shrewd observation.
• Dentist O'Connell: Ms Body Ars sod Journal, 17C6 to 1802. By Arthur Houston, LL.D., LC. With Diustratlons. London: Sir Lasso Pitmsn and Som. [Us. 6d. net.)
In justice to the trivial character of many of his remarks, the deplorable condition of our historical literature at the time must be taken into account. Why he preferred the arid pages of Henry to the lively narrative of Hume is not apparent, but Mitford's History of Greece was probably beyond the reach of his purse, and the introductory volume of The Travels of Anacharais, from which he learnt the tale of Thebes and Athens, was more succulent than Gillies and more solid than Goldsmith. He shared Lord Randolph Churchill's admiration for Gibbon. "He has mended my style," wrote O'Connell ; "he has improved my thoughts; he has enriched my memory." The sayings and doings of Samuel Johnson appear to have exercised a strong fascination over him :—
" Johnson I admire and pity. I love him one moment and almost hate him the next. He must indeed have been a great man, as his minutest actions and expressions are very well worth the relation. His mind was powerfully strong. His intellectual view was most powerful and distinct. Yet his mind was clouded with many prejudices."
O'Connell's first acquaintance with the lexicographer was derived from the pages of his own Mend, Arthur Murphy. "This is reckoned the best life of Johnson extant. He neither fatigues by the recital of trifles into which Boswell, Mrs. Piozzi, &c., descend, and still is so managed as not to disgust by a mein list of dates." To our relief, however, on a later page the diarist acknowledges that on the whole he is better satisfied with this work of Boswell than he expected. He was certainly no worshipper of the idols of the market-place. "As for Coke's Institutes, were it not for the happy absurdities with which they abound, the pedantry of style, the obscurity of matter, and the loathsome tediousness of trifling would create unsurmountable disgust."
The Journal, however, is not merely a daily chronicle of "something accomplished, something done," it is a record of his aspirations and the transitions in his mental and moral progress. At one time he is largely under the influence of Tom Paine, and Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft:— "The experience of ages has shown the inefficacy of punish- ment," he writes, after a morning at the Old Bailey. "The reasoning of the. speculatist shows its immorality. Yet men continue to inflict punishment on their fellow beings. Driven to despair by the wants of nature and the contempt of his acquaint- ance, the man whose most strenuous efforts are insuffic wit to procure him subsistence takes to the road and forcibly deprives the luxurious or the unfeeling of a portion of their superfluities."
We feel, with the admirable chaplain in George cle Barnwell, that we would not have this doctrine vulgarly promulgated, for its general practice might chance to do harm. But this is not a fair specimen of O'Connell's musings, and against it let us set off the entry for January 7th, 1797 :— "I would, and I trust I will serve man. I feel, I really feel the sacred and mild warmth of true patriotism. I will endeavour to make the narrow circle of my friends happy, I will endeavour to give cheerfulness and ease to the peasantry over whom I may command, I will endeavour to give liberty to my country, and I will endeavour to increase the portion of the knowledge and virtue of mankind. Oh ETERNAL BEING. Thou soesst the purity of my heart, the sincerity of my promises. Should I appear before your august tribunal after having performed them, shall I not be entitled to call for my reward' Will the omission of a super- stitious action, wifi the disbelief of an unreasonable dogma, that day rise in judgment against me? Oh, God, how hart thou been calumniated!"
O'Connell was still wandering from the fold of strict ortho- doxy, and showed small sign of his future fame as the eldest son of the Church. He was even initiated into Freemasonry, in ignorance, as he declares, of the Papal fulminations against the craft.
Until twenty years ago it was a condition precedent to being called to the Irish Bar that the student should have entered, and kept terms, at one of the English Inns of Court. It was a genuine grievance to Ireland, but it helped to give something of a common tone to the two Bars, and to enlarge the mind of the young Irishman by enforcing residence in a bigger world than Dublin. It was this require- ment which kept Daniel O'Connell in London for three years after his return from school at St. Omer; he reached England simultaneously with the news of the execution of Louis XVI. Most of this time he 'was a boarder at "Walpole House," Chiswick, kept by a Mrs. Rigby, of whom he has left a graphic description. She was— "about forty-five years of age. Nature so penurious in the gifts of form and feature has given her a strong mind, a clear com- prehension and a tenacious memory. Her faculties are cultivated by an almost universal study of the peerage of EagLand her mind is a register. The profession of her father, a coach. painter, enabled her without difficulty to acquire skill in heraldry. . . . . . She is a most violent and inveterate democrat as well as a deist But with all her own information she has not a grain of common prudence. While she should be exerting herself to procure another house she is talking of Beaumont and Fletcher's plays or descanting on Paine's Age of Reason. She seems in general to study the ease and convenience of servants rather than of her lodgers. In her attachment for oats she becomes foolish and absurd. But she has a greater failing than any yet men- tioned. It is a fondness for liquor."
We might be reading an account of a Dublin boarding-house from the pen of Harry Lorrequer or Tom Burke. Walpole House still stands, and is a prominent object, both from road and river ; and tradition identifies it with Miss Pinkerton's Academy, sacred to the memory of Amelia and Becky Sharp and Miss Swartz. By a strange coincidence, Mrs. Rigby did actually keep a school there for some time, and was helped by a sister : poor Miss Jemima!
O'Connell's residence at Chiswick did not give him much opportunity of mixing in the society of the Metropolis. He got involved in one or two boyish brawls, which on the other side of St. George's Channel would probably have been settled by the pistol, and he narrowly escaped being cut down by a dragoon on the day when King George's coach was assailed by the mob in St. James's Street. He took part also in the debates of "Ye Antient Society of Cogers," who in 1831 subscribed 210 towards the expenses of defending his seat in Dublin. In the summer of 1796, after seven terms at Lincoln's Inn and one term at Gray's Inn, he went back to Ireland to eat the rest of Ids dinners at the King's Inns in the Irish capital. He was called to the Bar on May 19th, 1798, the day on which Lord Edward Fitzgerald was arrested. Of his early days at the Bar, of his rapid rise, of his con- temporaries and of his judges, of the fun and conviviality of the Munster Circuit, the Journal tells us nothing. Dr. Houston bas done his best to supply the deficiency with an apparatus of notes selected from various quarters.
On another topic of absorbing interest O'Connell is almost equally reticent. We bear of the French Fleet being in Bantry Bay, and we have a reference to a conversation on the Rebellion, but the rest is silence. Yet O'Connell was in Dublin during those anxious June days when rebels vied with Yeomanry and Militia in deeds of atrocity, and when it needed very little ti turn the balance in favour of the insurgents. He had good reason probably for fearing "to speak of '98." He had become "suspect," but with what justification it is difficult to say though he had joined the United Irishmen, he speaks with little respect of their leaders, and was a keen member of the Volunteer Artillery. None the less, the authorities had their eye on him, the "Sham Squire" reported his comings in and his goings out, and be seriously feared that "the com- plexion of affairs" might prevent his call to the Bar. "My heart," he says, "is too sick for political disquisitions," and caution prompted him to tear three pages out of his Journal.
We wish we could have spoken in more commendatory tones of a book which represents so much labour on behalf of a great orator and a great leader of men. There were blots on O'Connell's escutcheon, which his later biographers have been at no pains to disguise. But he served Ireland as few, if any, of her sons have served her. If he loathed the Union, he was loyal to the Throne, and, above all, to the girl Queen. Had he given the word, he might have launched a rebellion to which '98 would have been child's play. He lived to drink the bitter cup of national ingratitude, for which a nation's mourning made inadequate return, and he died far away from the land of his love and of his dreams. The Life of Daniel O'Connell still remains to be written.
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