in defence of Magee,-the basis of this selec

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tion, this identification became ever complete. It was in 1823 that he founded the "Catholic Association." In 1828 he was elected to Parliament from County Clare, but was not allowed to take his seat. He stood again, was again elected; and, in 1830, just at the acme of his popularity, at last entered Parliament unchallenged. Now followed within and without the Commons the struggle for Irish liberties that is almost synonymous with the name O'Connell. The year 1843 marks the high tide of his system of agitation by massmeetings the "Monster-Meetings," so-called. This device of popular propaganda was O'Connell's own; and probably none have ever swayed more temperately than he the mighty forces of a Celtic audience, obedient to the incitations of impassioned oratory. For the most part in the open air and in the countryside O'Connell would draw from a radius of many miles a serious, sympathetic, and-strange to say-sober host of peasantry, in whom his voice

woke infallibly the sense of race and religion as things to be fought for, not with the obvious musket, but with orderly combination, moderate measures, and all that a tempered and single-minded zeal could do. The Irish people had long hailed him as their "Liberator"; he was the leader to whom they looked for Catholic Emancipation and the repeal of the forced union with Great Britain; and yet it is not the least tribute to O'Connell's powers that he was able to restrain a people laboring under acknowledged wrongs, and racially prone to insurrection, from any serious appeal to arms. The Government of that day was not moved by such considerations. The sequence of the "Monster-Meetings" was that O'Connell was arrested and tried on what must now appear a trivial charge of treason. He was even convicted; but the sentence failed to receive the approval of the House of Lords. Although clear of his difficulties, the man was broken, his superb powers gone; and like a true Catholic he had the wish to die at Rome. Before

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he left England he appeared again in Parliament and tried to speak—his fine voice sunk to a husky whisper. The report in "Hansard's Parliamentary Debates" of the day's proceedings, in reference to this episode, is laconically significant; it runs-" Mr. O'Connell was understood to say * * " On his journey, the "Liberator" died May 5, 1847, at Genoa, whence his body was returned. But in response to a rhetorical instinct that was medieval, Celtic, and yet, one feels, in this case not unjustifiable, his friends caused his heart to be embalmed and sent to Rome, where it rests in the eternal sanctuary of Saint Agatha.

The character of O'Connell challenges the biographer. In everything, perhaps, save his love for moderation, the man was Celtic; and every one does not care for the Celt. Surely he had the defects of the race: improvidence, unbounded invective, a speech too prodigal of epithet and ornament, the ultrasanguine temperament, and, more or less, the histrionic pose.

Oppose to these that, as a Catholic,