In public oratory O’Connell introduced a new style.  Torrential and overwhelming as Flood and Grattan had never been, he proved more successful if less polished.  The exaggerations of Gaelic speech found outburst in his English.  Peel’s smile was “the silver plate on a coffin”, Wellington “a stunted corporal”, and Disraeli “the lineal descendant of the impenitent thief.”

It sounds bombastic, but in those feudal forties it rang more magnificent than war.  Single-voiced he overawed the host of bigots, dullards, and reactionaries.  Unhappily, he let his people abandon their native tongue, while teaching them how to balance the rival parties in England, the latter a policy that has proved Ireland’s fortune since.  He loosed the spirit of sectarianism in the tithe war, and he crushed the Young Ireland movement, which bred Fenianism in its death agony.  But he made the Catholic a citizen.  Results stupendous as far-reaching sprang from his steps every way.

The finest pen-sketch of O’Connell is by Mitchel, who says, “besides superhuman and subterhuman passions, yet withal, a boundless fund of masterly affectation and consummate histrionism, hating and loving heartily, outrageous in his merriment and passionate in his lamentation, he had the power to make other men hate or love, laugh or weep, at his good pleasure.”

Yet during his lifetime there lived others worthy of national leadership.  O’Brien, Duffy, and Davis played their part in England as well as in Ireland.  Father Mathew founded the Temperance, as Feargus O’Conor the Chartist, movement.  And there was an orator who fascinated Gladstone—­Sheil.

Father Mathew succeeded in keeping many millions of men sober during the forties until the great Famine engulfed his work as it did O’Connell’s.  To him is due, as a feature of Irish life, the brass band with banners, which he originally organized as a counter-intoxicant.

Feargus O’Conor founded Radical Socialism in England.  As the Lion of Freedom, he enjoyed a popularity with English workmen approaching that of O’Connell in Ireland.  He ended in lunacy, but he had the credit of forwarding peasant proprietorship far in advance of his times.

Sheil was a tragic orator—­“an iambic rhapsodist”, O’Connell called him—­who might have been leader, did not a greater tragedian occupy the stage.  And Sheil was content to be O’Connell’s organizer.  Without O’Connell’s voice or presence, he was his rhetorical superior, excelling in irony and the by-plays of speech for which O’Connell was too exuberant.  Shell’s speeches touch exquisite though not the deep notes of O’Connell, whom he criticized for “throwing out broods of sturdy young ideas upon the world without a rag to cover them.”  He discredited his master and his cause by taking office.  The fruits of Emancipation were tempting to those who had borne the heat of the day, but there was a rising school of patriots who refused acquiescence to anything less than total freedom.