One of the ablest among the Southern Unionists said to me in these days: "He is superb: he does not seem able to put a word wrong." I think that the secret of his happiness of manner lay simply in this, that within the Convention he was happy.

There was a note in it that I never felt in the House of Commons, even when he was at his best.

There he always spoke as if almost a foreigner, no matter among how familiar faces.

Here he was among his own countrymen, and for the first time in his life in an assembly in no way sectional.

For from the first it was plain that, by whatever means, there had been gathered a compendium of normal, ordinary Irish life: farmer, artisan, peer, prelate, landlord, tenant, shopkeeper, manufacturer--all were there in pleasantly familiar types.