“And a good vote it was, Mr. Hawthorne. Well, sir, the Irish Protestants were in a craze of indignation, and eagerly sought a vent for their feelings of revenge. They wouldn’t touch Fenianism, and their minds insensibly reverted to eighty-two, and to such Protestants as Grattan, Flood, Curran, and Charlemont. Some of our most influential Protestant countrymen were now prepared to take up the cudgels—peers, dignitaries of the Protestant Church, large landed proprietors, bankers, merchants, deputy lieutenants, and even fellows of Trinity College. This was no Falstaffian army, no mere food for powder, but a band of men who had a vast property at stake in the country, who saw a thousand reasons why Irishmen alone should regulate Irish affairs. And now Mr. Butt comes upon the stage.” “The sorra a shupayriorer man in the counthry,” observed Peter, despite my previous admonition. “An’, be the mortial, me own first cousin wud have got six months for delayin’ Jim Fogarty’s ould ram from goin’ home wan night, an’ he as innocint as a cluckin’ hin, av it wasn’t for the shupayrior spakin’ av Counsellor Butt. ‘There isn’t a bigger rogue in the barony, me lord,’ sez he, addhressin’ the binch, ‘but this wanst, me lord, he wasn’t in it at all, at all.’ That’s what _I_ call spakin’ up.” “Mr. Butt, in addition to defending Peter O’Brien’s kinsman,” said Father O’Dowd, “was called to the front from an obscurity into which a wild recklessness had hurled him, to defend the Fenian prisoners in sixty-five. Mr. Butt became then a centre figure, and through the meetings of the Amnesty Association, larger than any since Tara and Mullaghmast, a centre figure he remained. The Protestants, who now chafed under the disestablishment, were many of them Butt’s old comrades, college chums, and political associates, and to them he turned, urging them no longer to act the secondary _rôle_ of an English garrison. ‘Act boldly and promptly now,’ he said in one of his powerful addresses, ‘and you will save Ireland from revolutionary violence on the one side and from alien misgovernment on the other. You, like myself, have been early trained to mistrust the Catholic multitude, but when you come to know them you will admire them. They are not anarchists, nor would they be revolutionists if men like you would but do your duty and lead them—that is, honestly and faithfully and capably lead them—in the struggle for constitutional liberty.’ Mr. Butt made a great impression, but of course was met with the old cry of ‘wolf,’ ‘Catholic ascendency,’ ‘the tools of the priests,’ ‘yoke of Rome,’ and all that sort of low Orange claptrap. The incidents of the defeat of ‘honest John Martin’ for Longford are too recent to bore you with now, but in that election you saw a Catholic people fighting their own clergy, who had foolishly pledged themselves to support the Fulke-Greville-Nugent candidate, as vehemently as they and their own clergy had ever fought the Tory landlords.