He has been accused of a want of physical courage. He did no doubt after the Phoenix Park murders ask the authorities in England for police protection, being, not unnaturally, in fear for his life; and he habitually carried firearms. He was at times in danger, and there was every reason why he should be prepared to defend himself. An anecdote was told of another member of the House of Commons whose initials were the same as his own, and who, taking what he supposed to be his own overcoat from the peg on which it hung in the cloakroom of the House, was startled when he put his hand into the pocket to feel in it the cold iron of a pistol. Moral courage he showed in a high degree during his whole public career, facing his antagonists with an unshaken front, even when they were most numerous and bitter. Though he intensely disliked imprisonment, the terms on which he came out of Kilmainham Gaol left no discredit upon him. He behaved with perfect dignity under the attacks of the press in 1887, and in the face of the use made of letters attributed to him which turned out to have been forged by Richard Pigott--letters which the bulk of the English upper classes had greedily swallowed. With this courage and dignity there was, however, little trace of magnanimity. He seldom said a generous word, or showed himself responsive to such a word spoken by another. Accustomed to conceal his feelings, except in his most excited moments, he rarely revealed, but he certainly cherished, vindictive sentiments. He never forgave either Mr. W. E. Forster or Mr. Gladstone for having imprisoned him in 1881;[36] and though he stood in some awe of the latter, whom he considered the only really formidable antagonist he had ever had to confront, he bore a grudge which smouldered under the reconciliation of 1886 and leapt into flame in the manifesto of November 1890.
The union in Mr. Parnell of intense passion with strenuous self-control struck all who watched him closely, though it was seldom that passion so far escaped as to make the contrast visibly dramatic. Usually he was cold, grave, deliberate, repelling advances with a sort of icy courtesy. He hardly ever lost his temper in the House of Commons, even in his last session under the sarcasms of his former friends, though the low, almost hissing tones of his voice sometimes betrayed an internal struggle. But during the electoral campaign in Kilkenny, in December 1890, when he was fighting for his life, he was more than once so swept away by anger that those beside him had to hold him back from jumping off the platform into the crowd to strike down some one who had interrupted him. Suspended for a moment, his mastery of himself quickly returned. Men were astonished to observe how, after some of the stormy passages at the meetings of Irish members held in one of the House of Commons committee-rooms in December 1890, he would address quietly, perhaps lay his hand upon the shoulder of, some one of the colleagues who had just been denouncing him, and on whom he had poured all the vitriol of his fierce tongue. As this could not have been good-nature, it must have been either calculated policy or a pride that would not accept an injury from those whom he had been wont to deem his subjects. Spontaneous kindliness was never ascribed to him; nor had he, so far as could be known, a single intimate friend.