embalmed and sent to Rome, where it rests in the eternal sanctuary of Saint Agatha. The character of O’Connell challenges the biographer. In everything, perhaps, save his love for moderation, the man was Celtic; and every one does not care for the Celt. Surely he had the defects of the race: improvidence, unbounded invective, a speech too prodigal of epithet and ornament, the ultrasanguine temperament, and, more or less, the histrionic pose. Oppose to these that, as a Catholic, under great provocations, he was tolerant; as an agitator, moderate in his programme; as a man, generous, high-spirited, and, after a convivial youth, notably temperate. Manifestly it is a character that lends itself to the old-style biography of balance. The easiest estimate of it is to say outright that O’Connell was pure demagogue; but if so, he was one of the greatest. He lived in a time when the conduct of political discussion knew no amenities. It was the day of slander, innuendo, high words for high words, and then--the duel. For the high words, see O’Connell’s reported speeches almost anywhere; as for the duelling, he had killed his man at the outset of his prominence, and lived a life of repentance for it. No man, it appears as we read the diatribes of the day, has been more soundly abused in English: his replies seem almost to strain the language of abuse. Thus it is that to the modern taste his style so often strikes a false note, and seems a crude mixture of passion and prejudice unworthy of a fame so great. Therefore O’Connell can least of all men be judged merely by his own words: the critic has always to remember the place and the moment,--the crowded, sympathetic court-room, the biased judge and hostile jury; or the myriad; upturned faces on a green hillside, mobile to each turning of the rhetorical screw. At such hours O’Connell must have yielded to his own art; the orator was subordinated to oratory, and often said ridiculous things. It was all of a character with O’Connell’s temperamental _intensity_. In the usual sense of the word, then, he cannot be called a demagogue--a mere puppet of the popular will. When the people and O’Connell had two minds about a question, it was not the “Liberator” who changed. Thus, for his opposition to Trades Unions, he was mobbed and hooted in the very streets of Dublin. Nor did he take the demonstration seriously; he knew his people too well for that. In a word, his appeal and influence were racial rather than parochial; he must be counted not as a great politician, or even statesman, but as one of the “shepherds of the people,”--in Mr. Gladstone’s phrase, an _ethnagogue_.