Soon after his return from America, McGee met the members of this group, and readily subscribed to their doctrines and shared their enthusiasms. Their ideas were new food for his mind, and he never wholly shed the influence of their fervid idealism. When he later pleaded the cause of Canadian nationality, he did so in the spirit and through the inspiration of the Young Ireland creed. We have from the pen of Gavan Duffy an interesting impression of McGee, when he became a disciple of Young Ireland: "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 at first sight 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 in whom one might dimly discover rudiments of the orator, poet and statesman hidden under the ungainly disguise." Needless to say, Duffy gladly welcomed such a promising recruit in his loosely formed association. McGee's new alliance damaged his connection with the _Freeman_. His articles tended to be too speculative and not sufficiently of the sober-suited type desired by the commercial classes who supported O'Connell and the _Freeman_. Moreover, he came to spend more time in the British Museum digging up the materials for Irish history than in the press gallery following the ingenuities of Peel's politics. His best literary efforts, which absorbed most of his time, were his articles for the _Nation_, and the tone of these was not acceptable to O'Connell. Finally, Gray, becoming dissatisfied, brought his engagement to a close. Duffy, who valued McGee's talent highly, immediately employed him as London correspondent for the _Nation_, and until his flight from Ireland in 1848 he remained an expounder, through the press, of Young Ireland's varying hopes and policies. Sectarian prejudices and colourless enthusiasm for the national cause all encountered his virulent denunciation, and he sought in accordance with the _Nation's_ prospectus "to direct the popular mind and the sympathies of educated men of all parties to the great end of nationality."