Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/146

 the rudiments of a poet and an orator, and in the end no one but Thomas Davis brought such splendid faculties to the National cause. But there were drawbacks which long masked the depth and range of his powers from his associates. In the midst of a group of self-confident, somewhat dandified young men, he looked ill-dressed and underbred, and till the exercise of authority much later gave him self-reliance, he seemed painfully deferential. By some strange freak of nature his features were almost African in cast, and scoffers parodied his name into Darky M'Gee. He was as uncomely as John Philpot Curran, but almost as liberally endowed with powers, which made one forget his defects. When I thought of him as a recruit, M'Gee was in London revelling in Irish annals in the British Museum, and I found that he had entered into an engagement with the Freeman's Journal, from which there was no honourable escape. He sent from time to time letters to the Nation, chiefly of historical criticism, but a closer connection was impossible at the moment.

The eldest son of the popular Mayor of Waterford had contributed some verses of no great merit to the Nation, and I knew him only as a partisan of our opinions. But he wrote me a letter on Davis's death, so generous and elevated in spirit, that I was greatly touched, and made the young man's personal acquaintance. He was in his twenty-second year, and he had an English manner and accent which perplexed me. This was Thomas Francis Meagher, destined in a brief