the Irish, but Celt of the Celts, every quality, every characteristic, good, bad, loveable, or the reverse which belongs to the type being found in him, only on an immense scale.  To the average Irishman of his day he stands as Mont Blanc might stand were it set down amongst the Magillicuddy Reeks.  He towers, that is to say, above his contemporaries not by inches, but by the head and shoulders.  His aims, hopes, enthusiasms were theirs, but the effective, controlling power was his alone.  He had a great cause, and he availed himself greatly of it, and to this and to the magnetic and all but magical influence of his personality, that extraordinary influence which he for so many years wielded is no doubt due.

[Illustration:  DANIEL O’CONNELL, M.P. (From a pen-and-ink sketch by Doyle, in the Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum.)]

Two points must be here set down, since both are of great importance to the future of Ireland, and for both O’Connell is clearly responsible—­whether we regard them as amongst his merits or the reverse.  He first, and as it has been proved permanently, brought the priest into politics, with the unavoidable result of accentuating the religious side of the contest and bringing it into a focus.  The bitterness which three generations of the penal code had engendered only, in fact, broke out then.  The hour of comparative freedom is often—­certainly not alone in Ireland—­the hour when the sense of past oppression first reveals itself in all its intensity, and that biting consciousness of being under a social ban which grew up in the last century is hardly even yet extinct there, and certainly was not extinct in O’Connell’s time.  Another, and an equally important effect, is also due to him.  He effectually, and as it has proved finally, snapped that tie of feudal feeling which, if weakened, still undoubtedly existed, and which was felt towards the landlord of English extraction little less than towards the few remaining Celtic ones.  The failings of the upper classes of Ireland of his day, and long before his day, there is no need to extenuate, but it must not in fairness be forgotten that what seems to our soberer judgment the worst of those failings—­their insane extravagance, their exalted often ludicrously inflated notions of their own relative importance; their indifference to, sometimes open hostility to, the law—­all were bonds of union and sources of pride to their dependants rather than the other way.  It needed a yet stronger impulse—­that of religious enthusiasm—­to break so deeply rooted and inherent a sentiment.  When that spark was kindled every other fell away before it.