We have, among a host of other witnesses on this point, Charles Hamilton Teeling, himself a man of the finest courtesy, most fastidious sense of honour and highest breeding. When Lord Castlereagh, on the day of his own arrest, informed him that Russell was also among those arrested, Charles exclaimed: “Russell! then the soul of honour is captive.” (“Personal Narrative,” p. 19). He tells further on how Russell, when the prisoners were brought to Judge Boyd’s house for their committment, was pained by Neilson’s levity. “No man regarded etiquette and the punctilios of politeness more. He looked solemn, stroked up his fine black hair, and with a sweetness of countenance peculiarly his own, and in a gently modulated but sufficiently audible tone of voice he begged of his friend Neilson to respect the dignity of the Bench.” Russell was a deeply religious character, with that combined humility, consciousness of his own weakness, and striving after perfection which is the foundation of saintliness. There is nothing nobler, more touching, or more edifying in our history than the story of how he went to his death. Unfortunately, later readers of the Journal, not knowing “P.P.,” nor the incorrigible practical joker who was his friend, have missed the point of the jokes and have taken the Journal’s accusations of excessive drinking and other peccadilloes as literal transcripts of facts. I do not here merely speak of Froude, who treats the Journal with his usual absence of all honesty in handling documents, detaches all the references to hard drinking, omits, _as a matter of course_, all reference to the fact that this Journal was written by Tone for his wife’s amusement, and on the strength of the diarist’s jokes against himself and his friend, makes out Russell and Tone as a pair of “ne’er-do-wells,” who, on a drunken spree, set out “to measure swords against the British Empire.”[64] We expect nothing better from Froude; but it is disconcerting to find Lecky and Barry O’Brien equally misled by Tone’s flippancy. Footnote 64: Froude, “English in Ireland,” III., 19. * * * * * We pass over a year or two, during which Tone was fully occupied by his work for the Catholic Committee, and the organisation of the first branches of the United Irishmen, and come to the year 1795, which was to be a turning point in his own life and in that of his dear ones—the beloved wife, their little nine-year-old daughter, and the two small sons, William, now aged four, and three-year-old Frank.