[Illustration:  Charles Lavan Duffy (1846)]

Mr. O’Connell himself, although he warmly approved of the club in the commencement, soon ceased to feel an interest in its proceedings.  For the first year, its action was confined to some routine dinners, which attracted a very fashionable attendance, and furnished an occasion for some brilliant speaking.  Yet the fame and respectability of such a body were seductions which few of the leading men in the confederacy could resist.  The Eighty-Two Club became a standard toast at public dinners, and its members were received as distinguished guests or visitors wherever they appeared.  Without having yet performed any distinct service, or realised the promise involved in its establishment, the club became a very important and imposing body.

Mr. O’Connell was its president, and Mr. O’Brien, Mr. Grattan, Sir Colman O’Loghlen and others, vice-presidents.  The first committee was composed of the Members of Parliament, Mayors of cities, and men eminent in the different professions and literary pursuits.  Complaints of inattention were made against some of its members, and at the election for officers after the expiration of the first year, others were substituted for the inattentive and inefficient.  The change for the most part was made by unanimous consent; but when a ballot was called for, other names were substituted for those on the house list, recommended by the former committee, and the contest resulted in the rejection of Richard Barrett and one or two others.  This was taken as an affront to Mr. O’Connell, though personally he neither took part in, nor was present at, the meeting.  Whether it was owing to Mr. O’Connell’s aversion to the green-and-gold uniform, to which he sometimes expressed his dislike, or his objection to the rejection of his soi-disant friends, or to his consciousness that the club was not subservient to his control, he took very little interest in its progress, and frequently spoke of it in terms of derision.

But that which produced the first sensible and vital difference between Mr. O’Connell and the Seceders was the Colleges Bill.  Education had long been a subject of anxious solicitude with Mr. Davis, and he was in continual communication with Mr. Wyse, its great parliamentary champion.  He had repeatedly urged upon him the indispensable necessity of the principle of mixed education, as the basis of any collegiate system for Ireland.  That basis was recognised in the system of national education which was accepted and approved of by the whole Catholic Hierarchy, with one exception, and most warmly sanctioned by the Catholic priesthood and laity.  Extreme bigots of the Protestant school opposed and denounced it as unscriptural and Godless, and one extreme bigot of the Catholic school echoed the objurgation.  It was not to be supposed that a principle thus sanctioned, tried, and efficient as applicable to the children of the poor, would be objected to when applied to those who were higher in station and older in years.  When, therefore, the Bill was introduced and its principal provisions announced, it was received with the utmost delight and, even, triumph.  Mr. O’Connell proclaimed in a meeting of the committee his emphatic approval of the principle of the Bill.