The day for the reception of the _amended Essays_ again came, and mine again made its appearance. In the interim was started a periodical, under the direction of some members of the Council, the most prominent of whom was the _favoured_ individual himself. In the second number of this periodical, on the Saturday after the last sending in of the Essays, there appeared an article, written by the Rev. Cæsar Otway, a member of the Council, under the assumed name of Terence O’Toole, in which half playfully and half mysteriously, _he lets the cat out of the bag_, and actually asserts, as the event verified, that the premium was already determined _to a member of their own body_! Here are his words:-- “The Round Tower, to the right, is a prodigious puzzler to antiquarians. Quires of paper, as tall as a tower, have been covered with as much ink as might form a Liffey, in accounting for their origin and use. But all these clever and recondite conjectures are shortly, as I understand, to be completely overthrown, and the real nature of these Round Towers clearly explained, for the first time, in a Prize Essay presented to the Royal Irish Academy by an _accomplished antiquarian_ of our city.”[32] Notwithstanding the disguise here assumed of “as I understand,” and so forth, the writer of this announcement had, at this moment, not only _perused_ his colleague’s Essay, but actually registered his vote in its favour! And as to his pretending that the development was a discovery, by saying “for the first time,” he betrays therein the extreme either of _untruth_ or of _ignorance_, as the theory alluded to is but the _echo_, in all particulars, of Montmorency’s book, every sentence in which I prove erroneous in the early chapters of the present volume! I could no longer, however, be ignorant as to the _identity_ of the person in whose favour Dr. M’Donnell had told me the Council had “made up their minds”;--casually corroborated afterwards by Dr. Singer!--I saw at once that the “_accomplished_ antiquarian of our city” was Mr. Petrie, the antiquarian _artist_ of the Royal Irish Academy--himself a member of their Council!