Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/287

 themselves on this occasion. O'Brien retired from that scene of riotous disorder, persuaded that there was no longer any hope of a peaceful settlement with England. Mitchel continued to summon the Government to an immediate surrender or an immediate conflict, but the policy of the Confederates was conducted in a different spirit. The union with the Old Irelanders advanced, clubs were founded' in many new places, and the project of a Council of Three Hundred, in which both parties would be fairly represented, and which would speak with authority, was pressed on.

Lamartine's "History of the Girondists" was widely read at this time, and one of the survivors of that prolific era reminds me how speculative persons insisted that they could discover among Irish Celts the identical types Lamartine had exhibited among the Gallic branch of the race. "Lafayette, the gentleman of ancient lineage and generous nature, become a leader and spokesman of the suffering people, did he not live again in Smith O'Brien? Vergniaud, the son of a provincial bourgeois, raised by his splendid gifts to be the orator of his race, was it not an earlier Meagher? Robespierre, the country lawyer, accepted as their chief by the Jacobins of Paris, because he was always more Jacobin than they, was it not Mitchel? Was not Dillon the prudent, the steadfast Brissot; Dillon's father-in-law, William O'Hara, marvellously youthful and resourceful under his grey hairs, was Dumouriez; John Martin, the honest, simple Mayor Bailly; M'Gee, Camille Desmoulins; and Duffy, who organised the movement in his closet, Carnot." But woe is me! there was one fatal difference, none of these accomplished the work which made the names of their prototypes immortal.

The state of Ireland excited lively interest on the Continent, and many French and German tourists might be encountered in the country this year, and some English philosophers who were persuaded they could master the Irish problem from the sunny side of an Irish jaunting car. Among visitors of a better sort was M. John Lemoinne, of the Journal des Debats, afterwards an academician and a senator. He brought me an introduction from Frazer Corkoran, the Paris correspondent of the Standard, an Irishman and crypto-