Shines with immaculate hands;
Slays not a foe, neither fears;
Stains not peace with a scar!
"Be not as tyrant or slave,
England; be not as these,
Thou that wert other than they.
Stretch out thine hand, but to save;
Put forth thy strength, and release;
Lest there arise, if thou slay,
Thy shame as a ghost from the grave.
The government refused to listen to the appeals, and Allen, Larkin, and O'Brien were hanged at Manchester on November 23, 1867, meeting death with courage and composure, we are told. Shore escaped, since he was proven to be an American citizen, and the English spared him lest the protection of the American government might have been invoked in his behalf.
One more incident may be added to the chapter of Fenian rescues. This was the attempt to blow up the House of Detention at Clerkenwell in December, 1867, where two Fenian prisoners were confined. This affair was farcical in conception, but its results were cruelly tragic.
"At the very time that this horrible crime and blunder was perpetrated," writes a historian, "one of the London theatres was nightly crowded by spectators eager to see an Irish melodrama, among the incidents of which was the discussion of a plan for the rescue of a prisoner from a castle cell. The audience was immensely amused by the proposal of one confederate to blow up the castle altogether, and