Page:Brigadier-General Thomas Francis Meagher- his political and military career; (IA brigadiergeneral00lyon 0).pdf/18

10 Born in the city of Waterford, Ireland, on the 3d of August, 1823, he was placed, at the age of 11 years, under the care of the Jesuits, in their famous college at Clongowes Tood, in the county of Kildare. Here his young mind received the first impressions of classic lore, and of the skill and power of oratory which afterwards made him so distin- guished, and of which, even in those early days, he gave extraordinary evidence in his own school orations, He left Clongowes College to complete his education at that of Stoneyhurst in Lancashire, England, from which, after an Sassiduous course of study, he entered upon the world in 1843, with a reputation for ripe scholarship and rare talents which his future career in public life has permanently cstablished. The transition from the serenity of collegiate life to the busy scenes of political strife upon which the young student entered, upon his return to Ireland in 1843, was as sudden as that which the mariner, basking in the luxurious calm of the Indian Ocean, experiences when the fearful simoom sweeps down from the coast, converting the placid sea into a boiling caldron. The Repeal movement was then agitating the country. Every town and village was in a ferment. O'Connell playing with the passions of the people, which he controlled with a potency equal to the wand of Prospero, had constructed a gigantic organization upon the hopes he inspired, which promised to the aspirations of the most enthusiastic & national life. Int which, after the incarceration of O'Connell in 1844, was only redeemed from the obloquy of an ignominious collapse when the youthful vigour of the country, which had been uncor- rupted by the hackneyed ways of the politicians, stepped in, and declared that revolution, and not agitation, nationality and not " amelioration," was what the country needed. In the band of these true and earnest mno who inade this their Evangel, of whom John Mitchel, Thomas Davis, W. Smith O'Brien, Devin Reilly, Doheny, Jolin Martin, McNauus, O'Gorman, Dilloz, yere the leading spirits, Micagler stood in its front rank. What need to repeat the story of '48? I do not propose to do so hore. The effort and tho failure are but too sadly familiar. It had its heroes and its martyrs : the former could be numbered by thonsands; the latter, who fell directly under the bann of British law and obtained a place in history, may be but feir; but the exiles who