He had a true conception of what a great teacher ought to be; and for this reason he kept repeating his principles and his arguments in the same or almost the same words.  Many an admirer of his thought he dosed his countrymen far too much with, “first flower of the earth,” and “Hereditary bondsmen;” but, as he said about his attacks on men, it was calculation made him do it, and he proclaimed this so late as 1846, at the Repeal Association, in the following words:  “I have often said, and repeated it over and over again, that I had found, that it was not sufficient in politics to enunciate a new proposition, one, or two, or three times.  I continue to repeat it, until it comes back like an echo from the different parts of the country; then I know it is understood, and I leave it to its fate.”  The lesson had been learned.

Physically, O’Connell was a very powerful man.  He was taller than he seemed, his muscular frame taking away, in appearance, from his height.  The earliest portraits of him make him a soft-faced athletic young man, very likely to be a dangerous antagonist in the prize ring, but his features, as given at the time, bear scarcely any resemblance to later portraits of him.  His shoulders were broad, and in walking he pushed them forward alternately in a rather remarkable manner.  This peculiarity, arising more from physical necessity than from choice, gave him a sort of slinging gait, which caused a Tory print to call him, derisively, “Swaggering Dan.”  This nickname of their favourite did not offend the people, they even thought it appropriate, there was such a dashing independence in his whole manner; and Shiel never wrote anything more felicitously true, than when he said of him—­“He shoulders his umbrella like a pike, and throws out his legs, as if he were kicking Protestant ascendancy before him.”

O’Connell was a liberal in the highest sense; he loved toleration; but he was also a Catholic to the heart’s core—­thorough, uncompromising:  proud of the down-trodden Church to which he belonged, with—­at first, perhaps, an intuitive feeling; later on, the proud consciousness, that his name would be linked with her struggles and her triumphs.

“One of my earliest aspirations,” he more than once said, “was to do something for the good of my country, and write my name on the page of her history.”  He was fervently devoted to the holy practices of the Catholic Church.  The fatal result of his duel with Captain D’Esterre, seems to have exercised a marked influence upon his whole life, and he frequently alluded to it in terms of the profoundest regret.  It was a sight not to be forgotten, to see him attend Mass and receive Holy Communion in Clarendon Street.  When he was at home, his habit was to walk from Merrion Square to that, his favourite chapel, to eight o’clock Mass.  On those occasions he usually wore a very ample cloak, the collar of which concealed the lower half of his face.  Thus enveloped, he entered