The facts of O’Connell’s life arrange themselves concisely from his birth, August 6, 1775, from a good family of County Kerry; his French education at S. Omer and Douay; and his legal sojourn at the customary Lincoln’s Inn; to his call to the Irish Bar (May 19, 1798), and the beginning of his identification with the Irish cause. From his speech in 1813 in defence of Magee,--the basis of this selection,--this identification became ever more complete. It was in 1823 that he founded the “Catholic Association.” In 1828 he was elected to Parliament from County Clare, but was not allowed to take his seat. He stood again, was again elected; and, in 1830, just at the acme of his popularity, at last entered Parliament unchallenged. Now followed within and without the Commons the struggle for Irish liberties that is almost synonymous with the name O’Connell. The year 1843 marks the high tide of his system of agitation by mass-meetings--the “Monster-Meetings,” so-called. This device of popular _propaganda_ was O’Connell’s own; and probably none have ever swayed more temperately than he the mighty forces of a Celtic audience, obedient to the incitations of impassioned oratory. For the most part in the open air and in the countryside O’Connell would draw from a radius of many miles a serious, sympathetic, and--strange to say--sober host of peasantry, in whom his voice woke infallibly the sense of race and religion as things to be fought for, not with the obvious musket, but with orderly combination, moderate measures, and all that a tempered and single-minded zeal could do. The Irish people had long hailed him as their “Liberator”; he was the leader to whom they looked for Catholic Emancipation and the repeal of the forced union with Great Britain; and yet it is not the least tribute to O’Connell’s powers that he was able to restrain a people laboring under acknowledged wrongs, and racially prone to insurrection, from any serious appeal to arms. The Government of that day was not moved by such considerations. The sequence of the “Monster-Meetings” was that O’Connell was arrested and tried on what must now appear a trivial charge of treason. He was even convicted; but the sentence failed to receive the approval of the House of Lords. Although clear of his difficulties, the man was broken, his superb powers gone; and like a true Catholic he had the wish to die at Rome. Before he left England he appeared again in Parliament and tried to speak--his fine voice sunk to a husky whisper. The report in “Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates” of the day’s proceedings, in reference to this episode, is laconically significant; it runs--“Mr. O’Connell was understood to say * * *” On his journey, the “Liberator” died May 5, 1847, at Genoa, whence his body was returned. But in response to a rhetorical instinct that was medieval, Celtic, and yet, one feels, in this case not unjustifiable, his friends caused his heart to be