Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 2.djvu/402

 it much, and I should probably have finished my life on the scene which had occupied so large a section of it, but that I loathed the task of answering again and again the insensate inventions of religious bigotry. It was a favourite theory with Orangemen and Covenanters that I could not resist the tendency to sacrifice my public duties to some inscrutable interest of the Pope, and though no one had ever produced a single fact to support the hypothesis, and though I exorcised the evil spirit wherever it appeared, yet it seemed to me a pitiful waste of life even to conquer in such encounters. I determined that my public career would end here, that I should never more become member of any Legislature, or ever again mount a political platform.

I had worked incessantly for forty years, but I was not less resolved to still work provided it should be at tasks free from the onerous necessity of attending at a particular place at a particular hour every day. Some of the unfinished designs of early life might be taken up and completed for work which did not aim to serve Ireland had no attraction for me. To be content and long for no change, " to pay court to no one and expect it from no one," to cherish the fruitful leisure in which thought is ripened and reverie is born—this was the condition I desired. If heaven gave me the capacity to work, gave me—

I would ask no more. Power had nothing to bestow for which I cared a bean blossom, and the popularity which was dear to me was the confidence and affection of the men with whom I had lived and laboured. How my last decades were employed I may some day write for posthumous publication, but my public life in two hemispheres closes here.