CHAPTER II.

Distinguished Irishmen—­“The nation” Newspaper—­“The Hibernians.”

I have met, as I have said elsewhere, most of the Irish political leaders of my time in Liverpool, but I will always remember with what pleasure I listened to a distinguished Irishman of another type, Samuel Lover, when he was travelling with an entertainment consisting of sketches from his own works and selections from his songs.  Few men were more versatile than Lover, for he was a painter, musician, composer, novelist, poet, and dramatist.  When I saw him in one of the public halls he sang his own songs, told his own stories, and was his own accompanist.

His was one of a series of performances, very popular in Liverpool for many years, called the “Saturday Evening Concerts.”  He was a little man, with what might be called something of a “Frenchified” style about him, but having with it all a bright eye and thoroughly Irish face which, with all his bodily movements, displayed great animation.  I can readily believe his biographers, who say he excelled in all the arts he cultivated, for his was a most charming entertainment.

Lover undoubtedly had patriotism of a kind, and some of his songs show it.  It certainly was not up to the mark of the “Young Irelanders,” one of whom attacked him on one occasion, when he made the clever retort that “the fount from which he drew his patriotism was a more genuine source than a fount of Irish type”—­alluding to the plentiful use of the Gaelic characters in “The Spirit of the Nation,” the world-famed collection of songs by the Young Ireland contributors to the “Nation” newspaper.  There are passages in Lover’s novel of “Rory O’More” and his “He Would be a Gentleman” that show he was a sincere lover of his country.  I agree in the main with what the “Nation” said of him in 1843—­“Though he often fell into ludicrous exaggerations and burlesques in describing Irish life, there is a good national spirit running through the majority of his works, for which he has not received due credit.”

One of his stories, “Rory O’More,” achieved universal popularity also as a play, a song and an air.  In it there is a passage which, when I first read it, I looked upon as an exaggeration, and as somewhat reflecting upon the dignity of a great national movement like that of the United Irishmen.  Lover brings his hero, Rory, into somewhat questionable surroundings in a Munster town—­intended for Cork or some other seaport—­to meet a French emissary.  One would think that a struggle for the freedom of Ireland should be carried on amongst the most lofty surroundings.  But I found in after life that the incidents described by Lover were not so exaggerated as might be supposed, for, as “necessity has no law,” during a later revolutionary struggle we had often to meet in strange and unromantic places, as I shall describe later, for most important projects.