Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/780

Rh 722 O C O O C Y than an end, lie was throughout life an avowed repealer. It should be observed, however, that in his judgment the repeal of the union would not weaken the real bond be tween Great Britain and Ireland ; and he had nothing in common with the rebellious faction who, at a later period, openly declared for the separation of the two countries by force. The organization which had effected such mar vellous results in 1828-29 was recreated for the new pro ject. Enormous meetings, convened by the priesthood, and directed or controlled by O Connell, assembled in 1842-43, and probably nine-tenths of the Irish Catholics were unanimous in the cry for repeal. O Connell seems to have thought success certain ; but he had not perceived the essential difference between his earlier agitation and this. The enlightened opinion of the three kingdoms for the most part approved the Catholic claims, and as cer tainly it condemned repeal. After some hesitation Peel resolved to put down the repeal movement. A vast in tended meeting was proclaimed unlawful, and O Connell was arrested and held to bail, with ten or twelve of his principal followers. He was convicted after the trials that followed, but they were not good specimens of equal justice, and the sentence was reversed by the House of Lords, with the approbation of competent judges. The spell, however, of O Connell s power had vanished ; his health had suffered much from a short confinement ; he was verging upon his seventieth year ; and he was alarmed and pained by the growth of a party in the repeal ranks who scoffed at his views, and advocated the revolutionary doctrines which he had always feared and abhorred. Before long famine had fallen on the land, and under this visitation the repeal movement, already paralysed, wholly collapsed. O Connell died soon afterwards, on 15th May 1847, at Genoa, whilst on his way to Rome, profoundly afflicted by his country s misery, and by the failure of his late high hopes, yet soothed in dying by sincere sympathy, felt throughout Ireland and largely in Europe, and expressed even by political foes. He was a remarkable man in every sense of the word ; Catholic Ireland calls him her &quot;Liberator&quot; still; and history will say of him that, with some failings, he had many and great gifts, that he was an orator of a high order, and that, agitator as he was, he possessed the wisdom, the caution, and the tact of a real statesman. O Connell married in 1802 his cousin Mary O Connell, by whom he had three daughters and four sons. Of the latter, all have at one time or another had seats in parliament. (w. o. M.) O CONNOR, FEARGUS EDWARD (1796-1855), Chartist leader, was born in 1796, and entered parliament as member for the county of Cork in 1832. Though a zealous supporter of repeal, he endeavoured to supplant O Connell as the leader of the party, an attempt which aroused against him the popular antipathy of the Irish. When, therefore, in 1834 he was unseated on petition, he resolved to go to England, where he established the Northern Star newspaper, and became a vehement advocate of the Chartist movement. In 1847 he was returned for Notting ham, and in 1848 he presided at a Chartist demonstration in London, which caused great alarm. (See CHARTISM, vol. v. p. 434.) The eccentricity and extravagance which had characterized his opinions from the beginning of his career gradually became more marked until they developed into insanity. He began to conduct himself in a strange and disorderly manner in the House of Commons, and in 1853 he was found to be of unsound mind by a commis sion of lunacy. He died at London 30th August 1855, and was buried in Kensal Green cemetery. OCTAVIA. (1.) Octavia, daughter of Caius Octavius, praetor, 61 B.C., and sister of the emperor Augustus, was married to C. Marcellus, one of the bitterest enemies of Julius Caesar. In 41 her husband died, and she was married immediately to Antony, with the design of secur ing peace between her brother and her new husband. Her beauty and her high character are praised in the warmest terms by all authorities, and at first Antony devoted him self to her, and seemed to have forgotten his jealousy of her brother and his old love for Cleopatra. But his affec tion for his wife was not strong enough to counterbalance the feelings that weighed against it. In the year 36 he went off to the Parthian war and to meet Cleopatra, and, when in the following year Octavia brought out troops and money to him, he refused to see her and bade her go back to Rome. She sent the money to him and returned to his house, where she educated his son by a former wife along with her own children. In 32 Antony formally divorced her, but she always protected his children, even those of Cleopatra. She died 11 B.C., and was buried with the highest honours by the state. (2.) Octavia, daughter of the emperor Claudius, was married in her twelfth year to NERO (q.v.). A Latin tragedy on her fate is attributed, though wrongly, to Seneca. OCTOBER, the eighth month of the old Roman year, which began in spring. By the Julian arrangement, while retaining its old name, it became the tenth month, and had thirty-one days assigned to it. The meditrinalia, when a libation of new wine was made in honour of Meditrina, were celebrated on the llth, the faunalia on the 13th, and the equiria, when the &quot; equus October &quot; was sacrificed to Mars in the Campus Martius, on the 15th. The principal ecclesiastical feasts in October are those of St Luke on the 18th and of St Simon and St Jude on the 28th. By the Slavs this is called &quot;yellow month,&quot; from the fading of the leaf ; to the Anglo-Saxons it was known as Winter- fylleth, because at this full moon (fylleth) winter was supposed to begin. It corresponds partly to the Vende- miaire and partly to the Brumaire of the first French republic. OCTOPUS. See CUTTLEFISH, vol. vi. p. 735; and MOLLUSC A, vol. xvi. p. 669 sq. OCYDROME, a word formed from Ocydromus, meaning &quot;swift-runner,&quot; and suggested by Wagler in 1830 as a generic term for the New-Zealand bird called in the then unpublished manuscripts of the elder Forster Rallus troglo dytes, and so designated in 1788 by Gmelin, who knew of it through Latham s English description. Wagler s sug gestion has since been generally adopted, and the genus Ocydromus is accepted by most ornithologists as a valid group of Rallidse ; but the number of species it contains is admittedly doubtful, owing to the variability in size and plumage which they exhibit, and their correct nomencla ture must for the present be considered uncertain. Mr Buller in his Birds of New Zealand identifies the &quot; Wood- hen,&quot; observed in great abundance on the shores of Dusky Bay in 1773 by Cook and his companions on his second voyage, with the Gallirallus fuscus described and figured by Du Bus in 1847, and accordingly calls it 0. fuscus; but it cannot be questioned that the species from this locality which appears to have a somewhat limited range in the Middle Island, 1 and never to be met with far from the sea-coast, where it lives wholly on crustaceans and other marine animals is identical with that of the older authors just mentioned. In 1786 Sparrman, who had also been of Cook s company, figured and described as Rallus australis a bird which, though said by him to be that of the southern coast of New Zealand, differs so much from the R. troglo dytes as to compel a belief in its specific distinctness ; and 1 It also occurs in Stewart Island, and singularly enough on the more distant group known as the Snares. The Gallirallus brachy- pterus of Lafresnaye, of which the typical (and unique ?) specimen from an unknown locality is in the Caen Museum, has also been referred to this species, but the propriety of the act may be doubted.