Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/43

 jails of convicted rebels, and, in the character of the king's Viceroy, opening his arms to the scum of society. The gentry held aloof from him, but the Catholics and the more intelligent Liberals thronged his undress levées. As he approached Monaghan the leaders of the Liberal Club voted an address and deputation, and I made my début in public life as secretary of the movement. The great man of the town, the Provost of a Corporation which had not met for a quarter of a century, could not, as land agent of an Irish Lord angling for a British peerage, altogether withhold his countenance; but he intimated that he would visit the Viceroy on his ow r n account, and not form part of any deputation. The men we mustered were the local doctor, attorney, woollen-draper, an exceptional farmer or two, and half a dozen priests, headed, or rather heralded, by a handsome and stately old gentleman, who was a casual visitor to the town at the moment—no other than Charles Hamilton Teeling. Mr. Teeling's name was a familiar one throughout the North, and it is probable that it was this unwonted spectacle of priest and rebel honouring the constituted authorities which is commemorated in Colonel Blacker's contemporary Orange ballad:

Lord Mulgrave received us as if we came in court suits, and he did wisely, for these men were the leaders of the club which ten years before had opened the county for the first time since the Union, by electing an emancipator against a combination of the gentry and the Government.

This was my formal entry into public affairs. It was on a provincial stage, indeed, but the occasion did not seem a small one to men, some of whom remembered when Ulster Catholics were ordered to betake themselves to hell or Connaught, and the authorities were deaf as stone to their complaints. At any rate it was for me the beginning of work. The era of indolent studies, of perfuming my brain with