O'Connell's opponents confidently anticipated his failure. He is too much of a mob-orator, was the cry of one set. He will never please so refined an assembly as the British House of Commons; he is too much of a lawyer, said another section of ill-wishers, and we know how perpetually lawyers fail in the House. His accent is dead against him, lisped a few others, and will be laughed at as vulgar. One of his most violent antagonists was Lord Eldon, before whom he had appeared, in an appeal case before the Lords, when he visited London in 1825 (on the memorable occasion of "the Wings"); but this Chancellor, inimical as he was, turned round to Lord Wynford (then Sir W. D. Best), when the speech was ended, and said, "What a knowledge of law!—how condensed, yet how clear his argument!—how extremely gentlemanly, and even courtierly is his manner. Let him only be in the House once, and he will carry every thing before him." Many even of O'Connell's own friends doubted whether he could accommodate himself to the manners, fashion, habits, and restrictions of that very artifici al assemblage, presumed to contain "the collective wisdom of the nation," but the slightest doubt on the subject does not appear to have cast its shadow into his own mind. To him, as to Lady Macbeth, there was no such word as—fail! Like Nelson, he did not know what fear was.
His putting up for Clare Election, in 1828, was one of the boldest measures ever ventured on—short of raising the banner of revolt against the government. It compelled Wellington and Peel to concede Catholic Emancipation—a concession ungracious and ungrateful, since it was clogged with a clause, the result of personal spite, prohibiting O'Connell, because he had been elected in 1828, from taking the oaths contained in the Relief Bill of 1829. That prohibition sent him back to Clare for re-election, and he entered Parliament with his mind not unnaturally angry at the injustice for which he had been singled out as a victim.
He took his seat, and, almost immediately, it was perceived that he was not to be trifled with. Nature had been bountiful to him. In stature tall, and so strongly built that it was only by seeing, when a man of ordinary height was by his side, how much he over-topped him. Physical vigour and mental strength were well combined in him. Then, his voice—a miraculous organ, full of power, but not deficient, either, in mellow sweetness. His glance told little—but his lips were singularly expressive, as much so as the eyes are to ordinary mortals. Add to this, a full consciousness of power—a conviction that he had been the main agent for opening Parliament to his hitherto prohibited co-religionists—that Ireland looked to him, and not without cause, for a great deal more—that he virtually represented, not the men of Clare only, but was "Member for all Ireland,"—that he was a tactician, trained by thirty years of public life,—that he had also the practiced skill in handling all the available points of an argument which hi s professional career had given him,—and that he then looked upon Emancipation only as an instalment. Put all these together, and it will be seen, at once, that the man in whom they were embodied could scarcely fail to make himself felt, dreaded, and much observed.
In the first twelvemonth—that is, from his re-election in 1829, until the meeting of the new Parliament in November 1830—O'Connell disappointed a great many by playing what may be called a waiting game. It was expected that he would be perpetually speaking, upon all occasions, and, in that case, attempts would have been made to laugh, or cough, or clamor him down. He voted regularly, and always on the right side. In 1831, when the Grey ministry were in power, O'Connell, now strengthened by a strong and compact body of Irish members pledged to work with and under him (their return was the result of the General Election), took the station in the Legislature which he maintained for nearly fifteen years. During the prolonged struggle for Parliamentary Reform, one of the most impressive speeches in advocacy of the measure was O'Connell's. On all great occasions his voice was heard and his vote given. It cannot be asserted that he invariably spoke and voted as now, when we read the events of those days as history, it may dispassionately be thought he should have done; but he was undoubtedly an indefatigable, earnest, eloquent member of Parliament, through whose pertinacity and tact many concessions were made to Ireland which were calculated to serve her. The geniality of his nature was as unchecked in the Senate as it had been at the Bar, or in the Catholic Association. He was eminently a good-tempered man, and this availed him much in the House of Commons, where, if it so please him, a man can readily make himself and others uncomfortable by the exhibition of even a small portion of ill-temper. Sometimes he laughed at his opponents, but so good-naturedly that they also enjoyed the jest. Such was his cu t at John Walter, proprietor of the Times, who had remained on the ministerial benches after his Tory friends had quitted them. He removed, speedily enough, when O'Connell pointed to him as—
"The last rose of summer, left blooming alone."
So, when Lord Stanley (now Earl of Derby) separating from the Whigs, started a party of his own, which was lamentably small, O'Connell quoted against him a couplet from a familiar poet—
"Thus down thy side, romantic Ashbourne, glides
The Derby dilly, carrying six insides."
And so, pre-eminent over all was his parody on Dryden's celebrated comparison. Three Colonels (Perceval, Verner, and Sibthorpe) represented Sligo, Armagh, and Lincoln. The two first were smooth-faced and whiskerless as a maiden. Sibthorpe is "bearded like a bard." O'Connell, alluding to them in the House, thus hit them off, amid a general roar, in which the victimized trio could not refrain from joining—
"Three Colonels in three distant counties born,