y which her people were characterised. He was
anxious to see his country independent and prosperous, and in order
to be so, wished to see a severance from England, and a full and
unmitigated ascendancy of the Roman Catholic religion. Personally, Mr.
Duffy was too generous, kind-hearted, and manly to persecute, and would
have been among the first to endanger himself by interposing to protect
another from the chain or brand of the persecutor; but the tone of his
writings, and the writings of those who found readiest access to the
columns of his journal, was relentlessly bigoted. If mobs fell upon
zealous, or, it may be, over-zealous clergymen or Scripture-readers,
the Nation always extenuated the ruffianism, and abused the objects of
popular violence. Some reason for this course, applicable only to the
particular case, or to a class of cases under which it was ranged,
was always relied upon in justification of these bitter outbreaks of
intolerance, but the paragraphs in which the vituperation found vent
always disclosed some bigoted principle which constituted the core of
the article. O'Connell obtained an unhappy celebrity for his violence
in religious disputation, but there was always a waggery in his
most virulent sectarian harangues which relieved them, and left the
impression that his bigotry was professional or forensic rather than
heartfelt, but the _Nation_ newspaper allowed no humour to shed a ray
of relief upon the dark sentences of its intolerance. If indomitable
fortitude, endurance, and perseverance could win a cause, Charles Gavin
Duffy would have secured all for which he afterwards struggled and
suffered. The political economy of Mr. Duffy, judging from the columns
of the _Nation_, was not much more enlightened than that of his
coadjutors.

Such were the men who constituted the leaders of the Young Ireland
section of the Repeal Association. There were others who possessed
eloquence, courage, and patriotism, but they did not occupy the
front rank. With this fresh, youthful, earnest, intellectual, and
uncompromising body of young men O'Connell had to compete almost
single-handed; for although he was well supported by the priests, and by
the old hacks of the association, he alone could confront intellectually
so gifted an array of antagonists, or maintain, with any chance of
victory, his side in the logomachy which was perpetually proceeding
within the circle of the Repeal Association. Moore, in one of his
me