Charles Q Conor. consistency with which Mr. O'Conor kept it up, it must have been extremely irksome to him. One could heartily wish that these generous and eloquent defenders could have explained away, on the same hypothesis, his public views of human slavery. It is but echoing the opinion of foes and friends alike to say that he was the very soul of personal purity and professional honor. Truly, a mixed character, lacking in candor and simplicity: if posterity does him in justice, he himself must be much to blame for it, and of this his defiant spirit will be as regardless now as it was when it inhabited its earthly tenement. Mr. O'Conor was not a humorous man, but still he had a grim kind of pleasantry, ard undoubtedly a biting and tormenting wit. His power of sarcasm was very afflu ent and very "handy." One can easily believe that his speeches against Edwin Forrest were characterized by a " savage eloquence," as Mr. Bigelow tells us. From Mr. Bigelow's account he does not appear to have been widely acquainted with mis cellaneous literature, nor to have been a reading man. but he must have read well in his youth to acquire so good a style. He seemed, however, to regard reading as a vice, for he told Mr. Bigelow that " He thought the cheapness of printing in Amer ica had made overmuch reading one of the most pernicious forms of dissipation." An eccentric opinion, in which Mr. Bigelow avows his concurrence! Thinking so, why has this accomplished gentleman contributed so much to our literature? When Mr. O'Conor retired to Nantucket, it seems as if he might gracefully have laid aside his reserve, natural or artificial, and "condescended to men of low estate " on the little island; but I am informed that he did not, but retired himself, not only from the world and the late theatre of his brilliant achievement, but from Nantucket itself and its small population of curious observers of the lion of the sea-girt desert. The truth is,
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I think, that he was not a democrat, but an aristocrat, and not an easy and tolerant aristocrat. I would not call him arrogant, but supremely indifferent to his neighbors, and profoundly conscious of his own un questionable superiority. He did not make his retirement a mask for continued control in the affairs of his late domain, like Charles V. in the convent of Yuste, but he did sometimes yearn to be out in the world again. On one occasion he told Mr. Bige low that he was " spoiling for a fight," and on another, having come to New York, and overcome a hackman who overcharged him, he avowed that it was worth the journey from Nantucket just to beat that fellow! At Nantucket, however, he unostentati ously exemplified the most beautiful and lovable trait of his character — his fidelity to early benefactors. . When he first entered on practice in New York, Mr. Pardon, a merchant/indorsed his note for some three hundred dollars, to enable him to buy his first law-books. Some sixty years later, in charge of his house at Nantucket he put his adopted daughter, a great-granddaughter of that unforgotten benefactor, and dying, he left her that house with its furniture, his library, his watch, and one-third of the rest of his estate. Some years before his death Mr. O'Conor was so seriously ill that his life was despaired of for a long time, and the country expected the news of his demise at any moment. But he, doubtless mindful of the old writer's assertion that " man doth not yield himself unto death save through the weakness of his feeble will," and not being quite ready to go, resolved that he would not, and he did not. His recovery was an amazing assertion of the power of the human will, — in Mr. O'Conor's case an imperial attribute. If old Glanvill could have witnessed his death, he would have confessed that his assertion was wrong in at least one instance. To prove himself an exception to most men in many points, he built a great country-house
