Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/78

 me that it might be still carried on for the purpose for which it was created, I removed to Dublin in the autumn of the same year (1842), and the first number of the Nation was published on the 15th of October. Before leaving Belfast I took another decisive step in life by becoming engaged to be married to one who had sweetened my life during my residence in that conventicle.

A little earlier I was invited to a public dinner in Edinburgh, and saw that fine city for the first time. I was more anxious to see Christopher North than the Calton Hill, but did not succeed. Perhaps I escaped being impaled on an epigram. A dozen years earlier John Lawless, my predecessor as a National journalist in Belfast, was entertained by his admirers in Edinburgh, and "Crusty Christopher" declared in the "Noctes" that "the editor from Belfast was as great a goose as ever gabbled on a green or was grilled on a gridiron."