Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 2.djvu/328

 322

NOTES AND QUERIES. [IIS.VIH. OCT. 25,1913.

contributions were signed ' Syndercombe,' and those of Grattan variously ' Posthumous ' and ' Pericles.' He also wrote the introduction to the whole collection published as ' Baratariana,' after Townshend's recall."

Sir John Gilbert, writing of the public services of The Freeman's Journal at this period, says :

" Of the essays published in The Freeman which tended to promote the peaceful revolution of 1782, the most remarkable were those published by Dr. Frederick Webb and Robert Johnson over the signatures of ' Guatimozin ' and ' Causidicus,' several times republished. One of the latter contained the following passage, often misquoted : ' Through the intricacies of English law, the gradation of Ireland may be traced, as the way of a wounded man, by the blood which follows it,' "

Dr. Madden is quoted as " being moved to praise," for he writes :

" In No. 50, for January the 9th, 1770, the first of a series of the ablest articles I have ever seen on the operation of Poynings's Law and the evils resulting to Ireland from it, is to be found ; the signature to that letter is ' Liberty.' These articles," continues Dr. Madden, " extending to twenty-three in number, were published in The Freeman's Journal down to No. 75 for May, 1770. Most assuredly the germ of the agitation which terminated in the legislative independence of Ireland existed in those very remarkable letters."

After nearly twenty years of honourable service to the cause of the country and of the party of patriotism, independence, and reform, the paper fell into the hands of the enemy. How Francis Higgins succeeded in laying his hands upon it is told in Henry McDougall's book ' Sketches of Irish Political Characters,' published anonymously in Lon- don in 1799. On the death of Higgins in January, 1802, the paper came into the hands of Miss Frances Tracy, and on her marriage her husband, Philip Whitfield Harvey, took control of the paper "and thus The Freeman's Journal, after its sad years of more than Babylonish captivity, was redeemed and placed in the control of an honourable man." Michael Staunton, who succeeded him, wrote of Harvey, on his death in August, 1826, that "he raised the journal from a state of comparative obscurity and decay to the first rank of the metropolitan Press." " His enterprise led him to print the first twenty - column sheet that was ever used at the diurnal Press in this or any other part of the British Dominions."

" Harvey was a very serious sufferer in the warfare waged against the independent Press in the Saurin Administration. In his effort to resist that ruthless persecution his pecuniary losses were great, and one publication caused him an incarceration of nine months."

At the commencement of the Wellesley- Pole crusade against the Catholic Board, the Administration made great efforts to- secure the neutrality of The Freeman's: Journal, and

"it is understood that nearly the entire news- paper patronage which the Government could command was repeatedly tendered to Mr. Harvey ; and this patronage included not merely annual hundreds, but annual thousands of pounds."

Among those who followed Harvey to his grave was Henry Grattan junior, who in the previous June had been elected for his father's old seat, the City of Dublin.

"He married Miss Mary O'Kelly Harvey, the heiress, and thus time in its course brought The Freeman's Journal into the possession of a Grattan."

Grattan died in 1859 in his seventieth year. He had disposed of The Freeman's Journal in 1830 to Mr. Patrick Lavelle, who was the- first Roman Catholic proprietor of the paper. On Lavelle's death in 1837 it became thepro- pertyof his widow, who in 184 Isold her interest to a group of strong supporters of O'Con- nell's Repeal policy, consisting of Dr. John Gray, his brother Wilson Gray, his brother- in-law Mr. Torrens McCullagh, Dr. Atkin- son, and John McNamara Cantwell. Mr. McCullagh, who in 1863 assumed his mother's name Torrens, was for twenty years one- of the best -known metropolitan members of Parliament. An account of him is included in the ' D.N.B.'

JOHN COLLINS FRANCIS.

(To be continued.)

EMANUEL SWEDENBORG'S

MANUSCRIPTS : REPRODUCTION IN FACSIMILE.

(See ante, p. 301.)

IN 1898 there was organized in New York the Swedenborg Scientific Association its- members being recruited mainly from those of the General Convention and the Academy of the New Church and on its behalf, in June, 1902, Mr. A. H. Stroh was dispatched to Stockholm, where, with brief inter- missions, he has worked ever since. In. 1903 the Swedenborg Society (having, as in the former cases, obtained the consent of the Royal Academy of Sciences, the guardian of the MSS.) commenced in Stockholm, under the supervision successively, of the Rev. C. J. Manby, Mr. M. Wennman, and Miss Greta Ekelof, a phototypic reproduction