A VIVID PICTURE.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3215, 19 October 1881, Page 4

A VIVID PICTURE.

An American paper thus depiots the character of one whose name has been so much in people's mouths lately : —" Mr O'Donovan Rossa, or, as bis baptismal BponFors called him, Jeremiah O'Donovan, is a good deal of an ass, in his personal and professional capacity. The suffix Rossa is only a nam de plume borrowed in the time of his connection with the revolutionist PreßS of Ireland a dozen years ago. After the collapse of Fenianism he came to this country and began war on the British lion at a long range. So far as his overt acts of war riave consisted of levying contributions on the hired girls and hardworking laborers among his countrymen and women to aid the skirmishing fund. He does all his skirmishing on paper, using the natural ammunition of a'man who can shoot off his mouth faster than a Gatling gun. He is quite capable of the wilful idiocy of putting a lot of explosive material on board a passenger steamer and the additional imbecility of sending his billheads with it, as is alleged in the present case. That he has done so, however, i3by no means proved. If he did, lie has no sympathy from the more levelheaded among his countrymen, who express universal disgust with him and his utterances ; and there will be no tears Bhed if his actions should lead him into the quiet side of a British or native "bastile." A pre'ty good evidence of his character is shown in his denunciation of John Breslin, another conspirator, who happened to possess a good deal of hard common sense combined with fertile invention and 000 l courage. It was Breslin who went out to Australia a few years ago and liberated eleven political convicts, carrying them off in broad daylight from one of thp strongest prisons in that country and deliveriug them safely on American soil. Such men have no sympathy with the murderous schemes of the desperadoes who plan wholesale slaughter, abusing ' the generosity of the country that has given them a shelter. In short Mr O'Donovan Rossa is, or pretends to be, what the happy slangology of the period denominates a " crank," and if he and Mr Guifceau were to be tied together by the tails and thrown over a clothes line to fight it out, the world would look on without a tear. In reference to O'Donovan Rossa, a correspondent in the New Zealand Times furnishes the following additional information : —" As for the ravings of O'Donovan Rossa, why the poor fellow was driven stark mad in one of our constitutional British dungeons, and 35 consecutive days and nights' confinement in a dark cell, with his hands tied behind his back continually, during which time too he had to eat his food and perform all tho other offices of nature as best he could, did not bind him in love either to Crown or constitution."