Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/45

 A TYRO IN JOURNALISM. DUBLIN

Dublin journalists, when I came to know them, were a marvel to me. They resembled nothing I had associated in day dreams with the profession I was about to embrace. Hazlitt and Cobbett and their compeers I knew by their work, and I thought of a publicist as a man somewhat combative and self-willed perhaps, but abundantly informed, and with settled convictions, for which he was willing to face all odds. The young editors of the Northern Herald were at least familiar with the whole cyclopaedia of Irish affairs, and had the enthusiasm of missionaries or soldiers. But the society into which I was now introduced swarmed with the gipsies of literature, men who lived careless, driftless lives, without thought of to-morrow. The staff of the journals which supported O'Connell had slight sympathy with his policy, and few settled opinions or purpose of any sort. The editors of the three peculiarly Catholic papers at that time were all Protestants, and the co-editors of a preeminently Protestant organ had been born and bred Catholics. To the reporters, for the most part, public life was a stage play, where a man gesticulated and perorated according as his rôle was cast by his stage manager. Most of them had lived through the first Repeal movement: and