In reality, no two people could be less alike: Kearney being a slow, plodding, self-satisfied, dull man, of very ordinary faculties; while the other was an indolent, discursive, sharp-witted fellow, mastering whatever he addressed himself to with ease, but so enamoured of novelty that he rarely went beyond a smattering of anything.

He carried away college honours apparently at will, and might, many thought, have won a fellowship with little effort; but his passion was for change.

Whatever bore upon the rogueries of letters, the frauds of literature, had an irresistible charm for him; and he once declared that he would almost rather have been Ireland than Shakespeare; and then it was his delight to write Greek versions of a poem that might attach the mark of plagiarism to Tennyson, or show, by a Scandinavian lyric, how the laureate had been poaching from the Northmen.

Now it was a mock pastoral in most ecclesiastical Latin that set the whole Church in arms; now a mock despatch of Baron Beust that actually deceived the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ and caused quite a panic at the Tuileries.

He had established such relations with foreign journals that he could at any moment command insertion for a paper, now in the _Memorial Diplomatique_, now in the _Golos_ of St.
Petersburg, or the _Allgemeine Zeitung_; while the comment, written also by himself, would appear in the _Kreuz Zeitung_ or the _Times_; and the mystification became such that the shrewdest and keenest heads were constantly misled, to which side to incline in a controversy where all the wires were pulled by one hand.