His excuse, as well as that of most of his collaborateurs, is to be found in the attributes of youth. He himself had not completed his majority, and very few members of the party were ten years older. They were chiefly composed of briefless but brilliant young barristers, fiery journalists, and hot-headed students. Their scheme, in course of time, developed into an association which was grandiloquently styled "The Irish Confederation," towards one of the wings whereof Mr. McGee occupied the position of secretary. He contributed spirit-stirring ballads and editorials to the _Nation_, delivered vehement harangues to the committees, and went about as deep into the insurrection as Smith O'Brien himself. He was necessarily brought into intimate relations with Charles Gavan Duffy, who, in his recent work entitled "Young Ireland," thus describes the effect produced respectively upon himself and Davis by a first acquaintance with young Thomas D'Arcy McGee: "The young man was not prepossessing. He had a face of almost African type; his dress was slovenly, even for the careless class to which he belonged; he looked unformed, and had a manner which struck me as too deferential for self-respect. But he had not spoken three sentences in a singularly sweet and flexible voice till it was plain that he was a man of fertile brains and great originality: a man in whom one might dimly discover rudiments of the orator, poet and statesman hidden under this ungainly disguise. This was Thomas D'Arcy McGee. I asked him to breakfast on some early day at his convenience, and as he arrived one morning when I was engaged to breakfast with Davis, I took him with me, and he met for the first and last time a man destined to influence and control his whole life. When the Wicklow trip was projected, I told Davis I liked this new-comer and meant to invite him to accompany me. 'Well,' he said, 'your new friend has an Irish nature certainly, but spoiled, I fear, by the Yankees. He has read and thought a good deal, and I might have liked him better if he had not obviously determined to transact an acquaintance with me.'"