, equally genuine, and coming still
oftener to light in those times, there might one other be added, one and
hardly more: fixed contempt, not unmingled with detestation, for Daniel
O'Connell. This latter feeling, we used often laughingly to say, was
his grand political principle, the one firm centre where all else went
revolving. But internally the other also was deep and constant; and
indeed these were properly his _two_ centres,--poles of the same axis,
negative and positive, the one presupposing the other.

O'Connell he had known in young Dublin days;--and surely no man could
well venerate another less! It was his deliberate, unalterable opinion
of the then Great O, that good would never come of him; that only
mischief, and this in huge measure, would come. That however showy, and
adroit in rhetoric and management, he was a man of incurably commonplace
intellect, and of no character but a hollow, blustery, pusillanimous
and unsound one; great only in maudlin patriotisms, in speciosities,
astucities,--in the miserable gifts for becoming Chief _Demagogos_,
Leader of a deep-sunk Populace towards _its_ Lands of Promise; which
trade, in any age or country, and especially in the Ireland of this age,
our indignant friend regarded (and with reason) as an extremely ugly one
for a man. He had himself zealously advocated Catholic Emancipation,
and was not without his Irish patriotism, very different from the Orange
sort; but the "Liberator" was not admirable to him, and grew daily less
so to an extreme degree. Truly, his scorn of the said Liberator, now
riding in supreme dominion on the wings of _blarney_, devil-ward of a
surety, with the Liberated all following and huzzaing; his fierce gusts
of wrath and abhorrence over him,--rose occasionally almost to the
sublime. We laughed often at these vehemences:--and they were not wholly
laughable; there was something very serious, and very true, in them!
This creed of Edward Sterling's would not now, in either pole of its
axis, look so strange as it then did in many quarters.

During those ten years which might be defined as the culminating period
of Edward Sterling's life, his house at South Place, Knights bridge, had
worn a gay and solid aspect, as if built at last on the high table-land
of sunshine and success, the region of storms and dark weather now
all victoriously traversed and lying safe below. Health, work, wages,
whatever is needful to a man, he had, in rich measure; and