ended
warning, "It is bad manners for a man under thirty to permit himself to be
in the right." But John O'Leary supported me throughout.

When Gavin Duffy had gone to London to draw up articles of association for
his company, for which he had found many shareholders in Dublin, the
dispute became very fierce. One night members of the general public
climbed the six flights of stairs to our committee room, now no longer in
the Mansion House, and found seats for themselves just behind our chairs.
We were all too angry to send them away, or even to notice their presence,
for I was accused of saying at a public meeting in Cork, "Our books," when
I should have said, "Sir Charles Gavan Duffy's books." I was not Taylor's
match with the spoken word, and barely matched him with the written word.
At twenty-seven or twenty-eight I was immature and clumsy, and O'Leary's
support was capricious, for, being but a spectator of life, he would
desert me if I used a bad argument, and would not return till I found a
good one; and our chairman, Dr. Hyde, "most popular of men," sat dreaming
of his old white cockatoo in far-away Roscommon. Our very success had been
a misfortune, for an opposition which had been literary and political, now
that it had spread to the general public, brought religious prejudice to
its aid. Suddenly, when the company seemed all but established, and a
scheme had been thought out which gave some representation on its
governing board to contemporary Irish writers, Gavan Duffy produced a
letter from Archbishop Walsh, and threw the project up. The letter had
warned him that after his death the company would fall under a dangerous
influence. At this moment the always benevolent friend, to whom I had
explained in confidence, when asking his support, my arrangements with my
publisher, went to Gavan Duffy and suggested that they should together
offer Mr Fisher Unwin a series of Irish books, and Mr Fisher Unwin and his
reader accepted the series under the belief that it was my project that
they accepted. I went to London to find the contract signed, and that all
I could do was to get two sub-editors appointed, responsible to the two
societies. Two or three good books were published, especially Dr. Hyde's
_Short History of Gaelic Literature_, and Standish O'Grady's _Bog of
Stars_; but the series was killed by its first volume, Thomas Davis's dry
but informing historical essay. So important had our movement seemed that
ten thou