man, striving for ends that could be attained by means which were honourable and adequate. If in later life I had occasion to exhibit any faculties deserving that name it may be assumed they were not wanting in the vigour and fervour of manhood and in the service of my native country. During Mitchel's exile no unfriendly word of him was ever published in the Nation, but I was now free to encounter him, and after the libels had proceeded for three months, and all been republished in the Nation, I answered him very much to the purpose. I published a letter to John Mitchel from Charles Gavan Duffy which was widely quoted and debated in Ireland and America. It was issued in pamphlet form as a supplement to the Nation, but was so much smaller in size than the newspaper that it has rarely been bound up with it, and has almost completely disappeared. This pamphlet was immediately answered by Mitchel, and as he is dead and I am living I shall not quote from it one imputation which he did not positively or tacitly admit to be true in the controversy which ensued.
The first number of the United Irishman contained a letter from Father Kenyon congratulating the newcomer that, unlike the Nation, it would not curtail dissent and extinguish thought by rejecting unpalatable communications. The third number contained the contribution whose rejection by the Nation had excited Father Kenyon' s wrath, and it was ushered to the world with the significant comment by the editor of United Ireland that this was the letter suppressed by the Nation. The case was this when O'Connell died Father Kenyon immediately wrote in the Nation an estimate of his character and career, which was considered offensive and inhuman while his body still lay unburied. A little after he followed it up by a second communication in the same spirit, which was postponed until a more convenient opportunity.
"Free opinion and free discussion (said the Nation on that occasion) are good in their time and place. But this kind of gladiatorial combat over a dead body has been disused since the Trojans and well-booted Greeks fought over the corpse of Menœtiades."
In that day of passionate revolutionary excitement and preternatural suspicion it was beautiful to contemplate the
