For the first five years the new organization made little headway. Its leader, Mr. Isaac Butt, was an able man--a lawyer of some distinction and a Protestant--but he was not a man to set the Thames on fire; he was not the man to control the fierce and fiery young politicians that had begun to flock to the standard of the National cause. With unromantic dutifulness to his place and his party, he annually brought his motion for Home Rule before the notice of the House, and was supported by some fifty or sixty members and a few sympathetic Radicals, but the Conservative government and its solid majority were of one mind on the matter. Mr. Butt died in 1879, and Mr. Shaw succeeded to the leadership, but on the organization of the Land League in the same year, he was quietly shunted in favor of Mr. Parnell, who, as the _Corypheus_ of the party, has so far displayed great skill, coolness, and self-command, and has been rewarded in Ireland by regal ovations, and by the suggestive title of the "uncrowned king." Mr. Charles Stewart Parnell, who was declared by one of the speakers at a recent meeting of Irish citizens held in Faneuil Hall, and more recently by Mr. J. B. O'Reilly in the _North American Review_, to be of American birth, is really a man of English descent. One of his ancestors was the poet Parnell. Another, Sir Henry Parnell, afterwards created Lord Congleton, was the associate of Lord Grey and Lord Melbourne in the reform movement of 1829-32. He was a graduate of Cambridge University, and a Protestant in religion. By birth, by training, and by creed, he seemed to be of all persons the most unsuited to the task in which he has been so eminently successful. "In 1871, after some years of travel in America, among other places, he settled down on his estate at Avondale, in Wicklow, within whose boundaries is to be found Moore's Vale of Avoca, with its meeting waters." Like many who in spite of early failures have afterwards risen to distinction, Mr. Parnell's first public appearance was a great disappointment to himself and his friends. Before the electors of Dublin he completely broke down in his first attempt at public speaking, and the great city which has since showered upon him the highest honors it can give, rejected him. In 1875, he entered the House of Commons for the first time as member for Meath. For the first few years of his Parliamentary life he was mainly distinguished for the skill and unwearied persistency of his tactics as an obstructionist, though he also succeeded in carrying useful amendments to such measures as the Factories and Workshops Bill and the Bill for the Abolition of Flogging in the Army and Navy.