He succeeded neither as man of thought nor as man of action.

His verses were not quite poetry; his prose was not quite literature; personally he interested and exalted, but without inspiring confidence such as is given to the born leader.
And in this year 1886, when two or three letters on the Irish Question appeared over his signature, few readers attached any meaning to the name.

Jerome Otway had fought his fight and was forgotten.
He married, for the first time, at one-and-twenty, his choice being the daughter of an impoverished "county" family, a girl neither handsome nor sweet-natured, but, as it seemed, much in sympathy with his humanitarian views.

Properly speaking, he did not choose her; the men who choose, who deliberately select a wife, are very few, and Jerome Otway could never have been one of them.

He was ardent and impulsive; marriage becoming a necessity, he clutched at the first chance which in any way addressed his imagination; and the result was calamitous.