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[192] or won more general regard in England. On the other hand, Mr. Smalley tells us that “never before his time had a departing minister been honored by addresses and meetings and resolutions of great bodies of English workingmen .... His Americanism was the dominant passion of his life; that and not poetry nor letters nor even those friendships and affections which were to him as the air he breathed.” Yet it is quite certain that this attitude was not quite understood in America, for various reasons not now worth analyzing, chief of which was the difficult position in which he was placed on account of Fenianism and from the difficulty of dealing with Irishmen who had been naturalized as Americans and then had gone back to dwell as agitators in Ireland. Even with American visitors in London he was at one time not wholly popular, though undoubtedly most of the attacks made on him were unjust and foolish. He was, for instance, censured for beginning a note to Lord Granville as “My dear Granville,” the censure proceeding from those who did not know how much more
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