The lady
had her own sufficient pursuits, chief among them a rigid attention
to matters ecclesiastical, local and national. That her husband held
notably aloof from such interests was the subject of Mrs. Otway's
avowed grief, and her peculiar method of assailing his position
brought about the periodical disturbance which seemed on the whole
an agreeable feature of her existence.
He lived much in the past, brooding upon his years of activity as
author, journalist, lecturer, conspirator, between 1846 and 1870. He
talked in his long days of silence with men whose names are written
in history, men whom he had familiarly known, with whom he had
struggled and hoped for the Better Time. Mazzini and Herzen, Kossuth
and Ledru-Rollin, Bakounine, Louis Blanc, and a crowd of less
eminent fighters in the everlasting war of human emancipation. The
war that aims at Peace; the strife that assails tyranny, and
militarism, and international hatred. Beginning with Chartism (and
narrowly escaping the fierce penalties suffered by some of his
comrades), he grew to wider activities, and for a moment seemed
likely to achieve a bright position among the liberators of mankind;
but Jerome Otway had more zeal than power, and such powers as he
commanded were scattered over too wide a field of enthusiastic
endeavour. 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.
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