Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 2.djvu/44

 converse there. O'Donohoe is next to me, but I seldom see him. He has started a paper, the Irish Exile. Poor O'Brien is really suffering a severe imprisonment, and his health is much affected. I am located here in a rural district with nothing to do but hunt and shoot. We have many sympathisers, and are expected to take high ground. Hampton, the Comptroller-General of Convicts, is quite willing to annoy us as much as he can. The people are all very kind to us and treat us with much respect and civility. The Government are evidently annoyed at this, and would be glad of an opportunity of humbling us. But they'll get none."

At this time a great design was undertaken by a great man. Dr. Newman came to Ireland to conduct and control a Catholic University, a task for which perhaps no man living was so fit. All the class who valued learning, and were able to estimate how much we had lost by the want of a University, gathered joyfully around him. We venerated him as one of the most pious and gifted ecclesiastics in the Catholic Church, but to most of us he was personally unknown up to his coming to Dublin. We were impressed by his sweet gravity, his simplicity of manners, and plainness of speech. But perhaps the greatest surprise was his lectures and sermons. The orator who had carried off in his revolt such a huge section of the English Church, who ruled supremely over so many consciences, was assumed to be passionate and eloquent like Savonarola or in a manner to which we were accustomed in the best preachers. Not at all. He spoke in a level voice, scarcely raised or lowered by a note, without action, and without the play of feature which we regarded as so large a part of oratory. A speaker may pause, Moore Stack was accustomed to say to his students, as often and as long as he pleases if he fill up the interval with emotion. But this eminent man exhibited no emotion. His speech was a silvery stream which never sank out of view or foamed into cascades.

The work which he had in hands had my deepest sympathy—to educate and disclipine [sic] the middle classes. He set to work to organise his staff of senators and professors. Men fit for the task were not plentiful, and he chose them not upon advice, but by the exercise of his skilled and ex-