e poems of
Thomas Davis. Late in the electrical year of the "battle summer," 1848,
he was arrested on suspicion of being concerned in a plot to rescue
Smith O'Brien and other state prisoners. The suspicion was well founded,
but could not be established, and after a day or two he was liberated.
From Trinity, after this, he went to the Queen's College in Cork, where
he took his degree, and studied medicine. When the Fenian movement
became serious, after the close of our American Civil War, O'Leary threw
himself into it with Stephens, Luby, and Charles Kickham. Stephens
appointed him one of the chief organisers of the I.E.B. with Luby and
Kickham, and he took charge of the _Irish People_--the organ of the
Fenians of 1865. It was as a subordinate contributor to this journal
that Sir William Harcourt's familiar Irish bogy, O'Donovan Rossa[26],
was arrested together with his chief, Mr. O'Leary, and with Kickham in
1865, and found guilty, with them, after a trial before Mr. Justice
Keogh, of treason-felony. The speech then delivered by Mr. O'Leary in
the dock made a profound impression upon the public mind in America. It
was the speech, not of a conspirator, but of a patriot. The indignation
with which he repelled for himself and for his associate Luby the
charges levelled at them both, without a particle of supporting
evidence, by the prosecuting counsel, of aiming at massacre and plunder,
was its most salient feature. The terrible sentence passed upon him, of
penal servitude for twenty years, Mr. O'Leary accepted with a calm
dignity, which I am glad, for the sake of Irish manhood, to find that
his friends here now recall with pride, when their ears are vexed by the
shrill and clamorous complaints of more recent "patriots," under the
comparatively trivial punishments which they invite.

In 1870, Mr. O'Leary and his companions were released and pardoned on
condition of remaining beyond the British dominions until the expiration
of their sentences. Mr. O'Leary fixed his residence for a time in Paris,
and thence went to America, where he and Kickham were regarded as the
leaders of the American branch of the I. R. B. He returned to Ireland in
1885, his term of sentence having then expired, and it was shortly after
his return that he gave to my correspondent the letter upon Irish
affairs to which I have already referred. He had been chosen President
of the "Young Ireland Society" of Dublin before he returned, and in that
capacity