Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/47

 Grinling Gibbons' carved ceilings at Kilmainham, and the noble palaces which Gandon erected on the Liffey. In Sunday rambles with T. B. MacManus and T. M. Hughes I visited the sites where the Volunteers had been reviewed, where Emmet was tried, where O'Connell defended his life against D'Esterre, where the Catholic Association met; and on week days I freshened my impressions of the Irish Parliament by looking again and again at Plunket and Bushe, who had been eminent members of that assembly, and were now sitting at the Four Courts. As I was an unpaid volunteer I had nearly as much leisure as I chose, and I occupied it in various studies. In company with James Coffey, afterwards a successful lawyer, I organised a debating society, which met in a vacant house in Sackville Street; a class to study French, which unhappily had for a teacher a German who had published a French grammer [sic] but understood imperfectly the art of teaching; and a little later a social club, which met occasionally over a broiled bone and a moderate jorum of punch. But above all I revelled in Irish history and biography. The panorama of Irish resistance, rarely slackened, never abandoned from St. Lorcan to O'Connell, passed before my imagination, and I burned to strike a blow in that hereditary conflict. Among my new experiences O'Connell proved the great disillusionment. I had formed a romantic ideal of the National leader, the successor of Owen Roe, Sarsfield, and Grattan, which he did not answer. I left the country ready to venerate and obey him; but he belonged altogether to the nineteenth century, and not at all to the region of romance in which I had placed him. A practical man of affairs, a caustic humorous commentator on the business of to-day, rising at times into flashes of fire, or settling down into cold logical analysis in which he caught and crushed the case of an adversary like a casse-noix closing on a walnut. His attacks on opponents surprised me by their fierceness and vulgarity as much as by their inexhaustible humour. At a Dublin election, where he had laid about him mercilessly, assailing Mr. West, one of the candidates, as Sow- West, and Recorder Shaw, a remarkably handsome and dignified man, as a fellow whose visage would frighten a horse from his oats the Lord Mayor of the day, Mr. Morrison,