Active Life
Martin also had a very eventful life. He was a colonel of the County Galway Volunteers. He survived two shipwrecks. He fought over a hundred duels with sword and pistol and earned the nickname "Hairtrigger Dick". He travelled extensively in Europe and the Americas during the 1770s and was in New England when the American Revolutionary War began. He initiated Galway's first theatre in 1783. He employed as tutor to his younger half-brothers Theobald Wolfe Tone, who had an affair with Martin's wife. Martin was in Paris when the French Revolution began during 1789.
Martin was on a first-name basis with many of the famous names of his age, Henry Flood, Henry Grattan, William Pitt, King George IV (who gave him the nickname "Humanity Dick"), Queen Caroline and Daniel O'Connell.
Read more about this topic: Richard Martin (M.P.)
Famous quotes containing the words active life, active and/or life:
“All is changed. All looks strange to me and gives me a feeling which I would rather get away from, although I know it to be the carrying out of natural laws. And I am not complaining. I am doing the same as many old people have done, I suppose, who have led an active life and suddenly find themselves living without a purpose. Oh, my heart is so full. I could write a big book on the subject of going out of this world gracefully.”
—Maria D. Brown (1827–1927)
“Women have acquired equal place to man in society, but the double standard has really never been relinquished; certainly not by men. Modern man’s fear of passivity or of the active woman proves to be as eternal as modern woman’s struggle to come to terms with her femininity.”
—Peter Blos (20th century)
“The vast silence of Buddha overtakes
and overrules the oncoming roar
of tragic life that fills alleys and avenues;
it blocks the way of pedicabs, police, convoys.”
—Denise Levertov (b. 1923)