Mr. SMITH O'BRIEN. [From the Times, August 8, 1848.]

New Zealand Spectator and Cook's Strait Guardian, Volume V, Issue 352, 16 December 1848, Page 3

Mr. SMITH O'BRIEN. [From the Times, August 8, 1848.]

The thousand and one romances about Mr. S. OBrien have suddenly given way to a most simple and unromantic conclusion. The unfortunate gentleman strayed into Thurles on Saturday, walked down the principal street, and asked a railway guard the way to the station. He was recognised, and eventually apprehended in the quietest manner possible, just as be had taken a second class ticket for Limerick. Everybody will ask what OBrien could be thinking of to run into the lion's mouth so directly and yet so ungracefully. Had he surrendered himself to General Mac- ' donald at the head of 2000 men, the incident would have gone down to an undiscriminating posterity, together with the surrender of Porus, of Dost Mahommed, of Abd-el-Kader, and a hundred other victims of fortune. The British press would have done their best to cut down the scene to its smallest- proportions, but the fact would have survived. <J Moreover, Mr. OBrien would thereby 'have established a claim to a merciful ' sentence. As it is, he has allowed hirnself'to be picked up like a £500 note in the .gutter.- There was jdit enough concealment to< deprive'his movements of the dare-devil character ihey might otherwise have had. He took a second class ticket/ and was too nervous to wait for the change. 'Never was there- so indecisive and characterless a proceeding; Ii suggests the idea of » man in?a dr«ara v but OJBrien is ridt quite s 0

innocent, and therefore not quite so favoured, by fortune as the fair somnabulist who walks the. plank in her Majesty's Theatre. But when the King, of Minister was enjoying a sort of royalty on the Keeper, mountains, what induced him to drop down in the .main street of ,Thurles, swarming with policemen,- detectives, soldiers, railway functionaries, newspaper correspondents,- and all that was dangerous ? The nursery rhyme says — The man in the Moon Came tumbling down And asked his way to Norwich. In this case he asked his way to Limerick, but the sequel bids fair to be very much the same as in the mysterious legend aforesaid. Mr. OBrien will most probably visit a Southern latitude, and, as aii' inmate of one of her Majesty's dockyards, 'become acquainted with the diet the legend refers to. Thnrles, for a very insignificant place, has contrived to get a good share of the insurrection. The ingenious, and no doubt treasonable gentleman who made Thurles the seat of the first outbreak, who fired its station, tore up its rails, and demoralized its soldiery and police, could hardly have imagined that within a few days that station would cover and confine the chief of the insurrection, that policemen and soldiers" would there be assembled round the great culprit, and those rails would convey him to Dublin. There was a ,prophetic force in ,the lie which fulfilled it the wrong way. The same word which struck terror throughout England is now a signal for confidence. ' We shall all remember Thurles, not as the focus of a destructive and bloody rebellion, but as the* place where Smith OBrien found himselftoo-closely watched and hemmed in by soldiers and policemen to hold out any longer ; and where accordingly he attempted to' fly from a country which, instead of nourishing rebellion, could not even harbour one solitary rebel. Mr. OBrien is a prey of that sort which ldses its value the moment it is caught. While tile' chase lasted and the scent lay weak, the prize was inestimable. The papers, were full of his imaginary .doublings and windings, as well as the'raultitude, the strength, and the ardour of the pack. An interest was beginning to attach to the Pretender of Munster and the" Boscobels of Tipperary. King Charles hid himself in the oak, and King OBrien in the cabbages. Rumour also added the coalpit to the adventures of the modern fugitive. But OBrien was growing in story ; he was rising into the, majestic, and looming into the mysterious. Passing from ridge ,to ridge, from the sides of Slievenamon to the tops of the Keeper and the -Galtee mountains, then sinking to the subterranean worldi and heard of alternately in mid-Eu-rope and the Atlantic, he was acquiring just that sort of prestige which takes deepest root in the Celtic imagination. Had he never more appeared in this vulgar working life he would have lived a thousand lives in romance. The hunter would have seen him still on the hills, and the colliers would still have heard his council asseoJbled in the pit. Whether O N Brien cares for such ideal greatness, after the prospect of more substantial power, we know not ; but certainly he has dashed' a world of poetry to the ground. Mr. Hulme, a tight buttoned railway official, detects him in the street ; in a few minutes head constable Hanover, D. produces a warrant for his arrest ; ,they. take away his pocket'pistol and conduct him to the gaol. In a quarter of an hour General Macdonald sends bine, toy Dublin and in a fe^r hours from bis arrest he is lodged in Kilmainham with the rest of the traitors. / • We have therefore caught our hare, as Mrs. Glass, says ; but now our difficulty begins, what are weto do with him ? Smith O-Brien is a traitor and a rebel ; nay, be is more, he is a mmderer; for he gave the word for the attack on her Majesty's servants, the fifty men beseiged in Widow Cormacks house. According to the la,w, and according to the universal idea of the crime, he is guilty of actual rebellion. He therefore deserves to die. ■ It is needless to say that he would have died for his crime in^almost any age or "any country but this. Not can we deny that it is. necessary to surround with wholesome terrors so great and dangerous, a crime. If judge and jury do their duty, Smith -O'Brien will at least hear the sentence of that death which the success of. .his design would have inflicted upon thousands. If, however, her Majesty should be., advised to commute the sentence, we have no doubt, the .people of this country will readily acquiesce in such an act of generosity /and mercy. Notwithstanding the gravity of his.crime, notwithstanding the blpodsied lie has s entailed, Mr. OBrien rngvesja contemptuous sort of pity even more than^ our indignation. It is impossible not to smijie^t the serip-copaic, air of his adventures. Buy6 ; iaugb t> ftt a man and bang him also is talrijigjVjt out both. ways. Were OBrien found lunatic, that would save his life. Jle is jit^ Junatie, ,-but, crazy- I—as1 — as crazy as Don Quixote when : he charged the windmills, or the sheep, qp when he rescued the wild beasts or

convicts.. We are not blind to the bad temper, and even malice, Mr. OBrien has uniiformly exhibited; but on the other hand, we cannot help giving him the benefit of the eccentricity, vacillation, and folly, ; which have marked his career, and rendered abortive his* criminal designs.