Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/221

 meant serious work, notably Ross of Bladensburg, Mr. Chetwode, a man of English birth, and John George Adair, a cultured young squire just entering upon manhood, and who seemed destined to follow in the footsteps of Arthur O'Connor and Edward Fitzgerald. But the French Revolution, when it came, extinguished this patriotism in a panic, except in the case of Adair, who persevered steadily. At a later period, however, the murder of his land agent drove him to savage reprisals, but I have never doubted that at this time he was full of the spirit which possessed his class in 1782. Ferguson's confidence in some immediate help from the gentry outlasted that of his companions. It was pathetic to witness his continual and quite hopeless efforts to inflame their patriotism, like a man labouring to kindle a vesta by rubbing the end where there was no phosphorus. While I still hoped in the Council I endeavoured to interest the Northern Tenant-Righters in it, but Dr. M'Knight, who was now residing in Derry, as editor of the Derry Standard, had no confidence in the landlords, and was not prepared, like the Southern Tenant-Righters, for a national movement. He was perhaps the most influential layman in Ulster, as he afterwards effectually proved himself; but he was the sort of Northern Presbyterian of which Englishmen know nothing. A man with a warm sympathy for the old literature of the country, with an equal contempt for greedy landlords and the retinue of "mean whites," with which the Orange lodges so often furnished them; simply an Irish Presbyterian who loved his native land heartily, but was frightened by the spectre of Popish ascendancy. His time for a public career was coming, but it had not yet come.

", June 28, 1847. ",—I had written the greater part of a letter to you more than a week ago, but did not get it finished, and, more than half-ashamed of the delay which has taken place, I have to begin again de novo.

"Our people are not inclined to associate with the Tenant-Right Association any political object whatever, and if the Minister League advocate Tenant-Right and Repeal, their real objects and those which they profess are widely different.