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 father was a journalist who did good service in the cause of Catholic emancipation, and Whitty the younger adopted the paternal profession at an early age. When he was nineteen, he joined the staff of the Times, "the youngest man that the Thunderer ever entrusted with literary functions of any kind." He was successively editor of that most outspoken of journals, the Leader, and the radical Irish organ known as the Northern Whig, A sad domestic calamity, the death of his wife and two children within a short period of each other, made the old scenes unbearable to his sight, and he wandered away to the antipodes, only to find an early grave awaiting him. The book by which Whitty is best known is his "Friends of Bohemia," a series of powerful and graphic sketches of adventurers in politics and literature. "The Governing Classes" is another work of his that attracted some notice. Montalembert speaks of it in the highest terms in his "Constitutional Government in England," and describes its author as "the most original and accomplished journalist of the day." Just as in the case of Marcus Clarke, poor Whitty's fruitful mind was full of ambitious literary undertakings in the new land of his adoption, when he was suddenly struck down in the flower of early manhood. A brilliant Irish-Australian friend and contemporary has placed on record this by no means exaggerated estimate of his abilities: "There is no story in the whole melancholy chronicle of misfortunes of men of genius so sad as this of Edward Whitty. That he was something more and something higher than a man of genius, that his nature was moulded of the profoundest sensibilities, and that he altogether lived upon deep and passionate affections, is evinced by the utter shattering and subversion of health, hopes, and interests in the world, which followed the loss of his dear