There were many noble and excellent qualities which the friends of John Martin knew him to possess. Rectitude of principle, abhorrence of injustice and intolerance, deep love of country, the purity and earnestness of a saint, allied with the kindliness and inoffensiveness of childhood; amiability and disinterestedness, together with a perfect abnegation of self, and total freedom from the vanity which affected a few of his compatriots--these they gave him credit for, but they were totally unprepared for the lion-like courage, the boldness, and the promptitude displayed by him, when the government, by the conviction of Mitchel, flung down the gauntlet to the people of Ireland. Hastily settling up his worldly accounts in the North, he returned to Dublin to stake his fortune and his life in the cause which he had promised to serve. The _United Irishman_ was gone, but Martin had undertaken that its place in Irish Journalism should not be vacant; and a few weeks after the office in Trinity-street was sacked he reoccupied the violated and empty rooms, and issued there-from the first number of the _Irish Felon_. There was no halting place in Irish Journalism then. The _Nation_ had already flung peace and conciliation and "balmy forgiveness" to the winds, and advocated the creed of the sword. The scandalous means used to procure a verdict of guilty against Mitchel tore to tatters the last rag of the constitution in Ireland. It was idle to dictate observance of the law which the government themselves were engaged in violating, and the _Nation_ was not the journal to brook the tyranny of the authorities. With a spirit that cannot be too highly praised, it called for the overthrow of the government that had sent Mitchel in chains into banishment, and summoned the people of Ireland to prepare to assert their rights by the only means now left them--the bullet and the pike. And the eyes of men whose hearts were "weary waiting for the fray," began to glisten as they read the burning words of poetry and prose in which the _Nation_ preached the gospel of liberty. It was to take its side by that journal, and to rival it in the boldness of its language and the spirit of its arguments, that the _Irish Felon_ was established; and it executed its mission well. "I do not love political agitation for its own sake," exclaimed Martin, in his opening address in the first number. "At best I regard it as a necessary evil; and if I were not convinced that my countrymen are determined on vindicating their rights, and that they really intend to free themselves, I would at once withdraw from the struggle and leave my native land for ever. I could not live in Ireland and derive my means of life as a member of the Irish community, without feeling a citizen's responsibilities in Irish public affairs. Those responsibilities involve the guilt of national robbery and murder--of a system which arrays the classes of our people against each other's prosperity and very lives,