Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/77

 A young Irishman entangled in politics had only one profession open to him, and I determined to become a barrister. On a visit to Dublin to keep my first term I met at the office of the Morning Register a young barrister who had recently become a writer in the journal. He was introduced to me as John Blake Dillon, and after a little talk we made an engagement to see more of each other. He was a man of the type which I had sought, and had not found, when I joined the Dublin Press. Frank and manly in his bearing, deeply in earnest in his convictions, and well acquainted with the principles which underlay and justified Irish agitation, his talk begat sympathy and confidence. He desired to make me known to one of his comrades named Thomas Davis, and for this purpose we made an appointment at the Committee Room of the Repeal Association in the Old Corn Exchange. I was less pleased with Davis than with his friend; he was able and manifestly sincere; but at first sight I thought him dogmatic and self-conceited—a strangely unjust estimate as it proved in the end. When I returned to Belfast I thought much of these young men, so fundamentally unlike their predecessors in journalism, and resolved when I saw them again to open a design, on which I had pondered frequently, of establishing a weekly journal in Dublin. In Ireland there was no journal resembling the London Examiner or Spectator, which were original, critical, and vital from cover to cover; and such a journal might, I believed, be created. What followed has been often told in detail; enough to say here that on my next visit to Dublin I had a conference with Davis and Dillon under an elm tree in the Phoenix Park, and we came to an agreement to establish the Nation newspaper, of which I was to be proprietor and editor.

After winding up my affairs in Belfast, when I restored the property of the Vindicator to those who had bestowed it on