The Sun. — 1848-08-08 (London, England)

THIS DAY.  TIMES.—The thousand and one romances about Mr. S. O'Brien have suddenly given way to a most simple and unromantic conclusion. The unfortunate gentleman strayed into Thurles on Saturday, walked down the principal street, and asked a railway guard the way to the station. He was recognised, and even• tually apprehended in the quietest manner possible just as he had taken a second-class ticket for Limerick. Everybody will ask what O'Brien could be thinking of to run into the lion's mouth so directly and yet so ungracefully. Had he surrendered himself to General Macdonald at the head of 2,000 men, the incident would have gone down to an undiscriminating posterity, together with the surrender of Porus, of Dost Mahomed, of Abd-el-Kader, and a hundred other victims of fortune. The nursery rhyme says— " The man in the moon Came tumbling down, And asked his way to Norwich." In this case he asked his way to Limerick, but the sequel bids fair to be very much the same as in the mysterious legend aforesaid. Mr. O'Brien will most probably visit a southern latitude, and, as an inmate of one of her Majesty's Dockyards, become acquainted with the diet the legend refers to. King Charles hid himself in the oak, and King O'Brien in the cabbages. Rumour also added the coal-pit to the adventures of the modern fugitive. But O'Brien was growing in story; he was rising into the majestic and looming into the mysterious. Passing from ridge to ridge, from the sides of Slievenamon to the tops of the Keeper and the Galtee mountains, then sinking to the subterranean world, and heard of alternately in mid Europe and the Atlantic, he was acquiring just that sort of prestige which takes deepest root in the Celtic imagination. Had he never more appeared in this vulgar working life he would have lived a thousand lives in romance. Smith O'Brien is a traitor and a rebel; nay; he is more, he is a murderer; for ho gave the word for the attack on her Majesty's servants, the fifty men besieged in Widow Cormack's house. According to the law, and according to the universal idea of the crime, he is guilty of actual rebellion. He, therefore, deserves to die. It is needless to say that he would have died for his crime in almost any age or any country but this. Nor can we deny that it is necessary to surround with wholesome terrors so great and dangerous a crime. If judge and jury do their duty, Smith O'Brien will at least hear the sentence of that death which the success of his design would have inflicted upon thousands. If, however, her Majesty should bo advised to commute the sentence, we have no doubt the people of this country will readily acquiesce in such an act of generosity and mercy. Notwithstanding the gravity of his crime, notwithstanding the bloodshed he has entailed, Mr. O'Brien moves a contemptuous sort of pity even more than our indignation. It is impossible not to smile at the serio-comic air of his adventures. But to laugh at a man and hang him also is taking it out both ways. Were O'Brien found lunatic, that would save his life. He is not lunatic but crazy—as crazy as Don Quixote when he charged the windmills or the sheep, or when he rescued the wild beasts or the convicts. We are not blind to the bad temper, and even malice, Mr. O'Brien has uniformly exhibited; but on the other hand, we cannot help giving him the benefit of the eccentricity, vacillation, and folly which have marked his career, and rendered abortive his criminal designs.