Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/88

 horizon enables us to follow the policy of the young men to its results. Of the more conspicuous and generous of our opponents scarce one escaped its influence. Isaac Butt, who had been recently editor of the University Magazine and of the Ulster Times in Belfast, was still leader of the most extreme Orange party in the Dublin Corporation. His successor in the editorship of the magazine, Charles Lever, nursed a rage against O'Connell so preternatural that it overflowed into his novels. William Carleton, Joseph Lefanu, William Wilde, and above all, Samuel Ferguson, were among the chief contributors; and even Ferguson, who loved his country from the beginning, and revelled in Celtic poetry and Celtic art, sent to one of his friends (who showed it to me) the first collection of the poetry of the Nation with the prodigiously false verdict endorsed upon it "Some of these fellows long to stick their skeans in the bowels of the Saxon." The Evening Mail was the accredited organ of the Irish gentry, and its working editor was a clergyman of the Church of England named Halpin, and his principal colleague, who afterwards became editor, was Dr. Maunsell. One of the Tory members for Dublin was William Gregory, son of a former Under Secretary, imported from England; and the Grand Chaplain and leader of the Orangemen who desired to repeal the Emancipation Act and restore the naked despotism of Protestant Ascendancy was the Rev. Tresham Gregg. Before half a dozen years had elapsed, Samuel Ferguson was chairman of a Protestant Repeal Association, declaring in prose and verse that he shared the principles of the Young Irelanders. Before a dozen more years Isaac Butt was leader of a National movement to establish a Parliament in Ireland, surrounded by professors of the exclusive University, clergymen of the Church of England, members of all the learned professions, the leaders of the Tory opposition in the Dublin Corporation, and his old colleagues, Dr. Wilde and Dr. Maunsell. At one of Butt's meetings a Senior Fellow of the University read a paper in which Charles Lever advocated a Federal Parliament in Ireland. At an earlier date William Carleton declared himself a Nationalist and became a contributor to the Nation, and Joseph Lefanu, who could not be seduced out of the tranquil field of literature, wrote