"How can you so tamely bear the censures I pronounce against your country?"
"Sir, England is not my country. Censure her as much as you please, you cannot offend me. I am an Irishman, and my countrymen have as little reason to love England as yours have, perhaps less."
EPISTOLARY BORES.
The number of letters received by O'Connell upon trivial subjects was sufficient to try his patience, as the following will show:—
A letter once arrived from New York, which, on opening, he found to contain a minute description of a Queen Anne's farthing recently found by the writer, with a modest request that "Ireland's Liberator" might negotiate the sale of the said farthing in London; where, as many intelligent persons had assured him, he might make his fortune by it.
Another modest correspondent was one Peter Waldron, also of New York, whose epistle ran thus:—"Sir, I have discovered an old paper, by which I find that my grandfather, Peter Waldron, left Dublin about the year 1730. You will very much oblige me by instituting an immediate inquiry who the said Peter Waldron was; whether he possessed any property in Dublin or elsewhere, and to what amount; and in case that he did, you will confer a particular favor on me by taking immediate steps to recover it, and if successful, forwarding the amount to me at New York."
At another time a Protestant clergyman wrote to apprise him that he and his family were all in prayer for his conversion to the Protestant religion; and that the writer was anxious to engage in controversy with so distinguished an antagonist.
The letters with which he was persecuted, soliciting patronage, were innumerable. "Everybody writes to me about everything," said he, "and the applicants for places, without a single exception, tell me that one word of mine will infallibly get them what they want. One word! Oh, how sick I am of that 'One word!'"
Some of his rural correspondents entertained odd ideas of his attributes. He said that "from one of them he got a letter commencing with 'Awful Sir!'"